About

A site about who builds a broadband network when the market will not

Skokie, Illinois runs fibre under its own streets. So does Chattanooga, and Wilson, and Lafayette, and a few hundred other places where a utility, a co-operative or a town council decided the wait was too long. This site follows that record, and the federal money and state law that surround it.

How it is organised

Four sections. The money, and where it stalled covers the $42.45 billion appropriated for broadband construction in 2021, the NTIA approval process it moves through, the Affordable Connectivity Program's exhaustion in June 2024, and the FCC's 2024 move to a 100/20 Mbps definition. Towns that built it themselves follows the municipal utilities, electric co-operatives and open-access networks, and the roughly twenty state statutes that restrict them. Skokie and the North Shore is the village on the door: its fibre, its library, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, and the board documents that record what was decided. The technology underneath is the physical layer — fibre, coaxial cable, fixed wireless and satellite, and the upload half of the definition that separates them.

Institutions named across these pages

Everything, listed

The archive carries all twenty-six pieces in one place.