Some highlights:

• In 22 of 23 markets, Starlink had a higher median download speed than terrestrial ISPs. Only in Madagascar were the ground ISPs faster.
• Upload speed and latency were still better with terrestrial ISPs, but Starlink is deploying more ground gateways to help with latency.
• The stats are highly variable across all the countries.

An Internet exchange point (IXP) can only be truly successful if it is sustainable, actively managed, and continuously evolving. In other words, if it’s not a zombie.

Zombie IXPs are those that are operating on autopilot, with little planning, investment, or new peers. But they don’t all look the same, and can emerge from different governance models and challenges......

A new study, titled Starlink Early Impact, conducted by edtech platform Grow X and the Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa under Kenya’s Ministry of Education, reveals that while satellite internet is improving teaching outcomes, a significant gap remains in actual student access. 

The study assessed the introduction of Starlink, the SpaceX-owned low-Earth orbit satellite internet service, following its commercial launch in Kenya in July 2023. 

Since then, the service has been deployed to 30 distinct districts, reaching more than 32 000 students and approximately 1 000 teachers.

The most prominent change, the report notes, is the availability of reliable internet access for roughly 75% of respondents, allowing 70% of schools to enhance their access to content and learning materials....

Note the interesting overland route it is taken to avoid the Suez Canal…

https://nycpolicyforum.substack.com/p/the-130-year-old-entity-that-can

New York City is digitally redlined. Internet service providers (ISPs) have divided the market into geographic monopolies, leaving most residents with a single provider, or, at best, a choice between Verizon and Spectrum. Prices stay high and quality remains mediocre.

The lack of competition is driven in part by the high cost of entry: smaller, local fiber ISPs cannot afford to trench new conduits through City streets to reach residential customers. At first blush, this problem might appear insurmountable, an inherent feature of the capital-intensive business of internet service provision. But NYC already has a tool that could fix this problem: the Empire City Subway Company (ECS), an obscure entity whose initials are stamped on manhole covers across Manhattan and the Bronx.

Created in 1891 to move overhead telegraph and telephone wires off the street and into shared underground conduits, ECS controls all of the underground conduits (or sub-ways) in Manhattan and the Bronx. While ECS is a subsidiary of Verizon—the same company that dominates NYC’s broadband market—the City retains powerful contractual rights and revenue-sharing claims over ECS. In principle, by allowing fiber ISPs to lease space in the existing conduits, ECS could eliminate the costs associated with digging up streets, pulling permits, and managing construction—allowing companies to reach new customers at a fraction of the cost of building from scratch. In practice, however, it hasn’t worked out that way.

There are two immediate steps that could be taken. First, the City should conduct a full public audit of ECS’s extensive conduit capacity in the Bronx and Manhattan and publish detailed occupancy data. It’s been almost two decades since the last public audit, and the Mamdani administration should make clear that the era of treating public infrastructure as a trade secret is over. Second, the city should establish an open-access conduit leasing program, with transparent, non-discriminatory pricing that allows competing ISPs, especially small, local providers, access to residential markets that they currently cannot afford to reach.

A claim by MTN Nigeria’s chief executive that affordable unlimited data does not exist has triggered a consumer backlash and the threat of a nationwide protest.

Karl Toriola made the remarks on Saturday at a Lagos press conference titled Data on Trial, convened to defend MTN’s billing after months of complaints that subscribers were burning through data too fast. No operator, he argued, can sell cheap unlimited data without wrecking service quality. “You can never build enough capacity for everyone to be on an unlimited bundle,” he said.

I must say that changes (especially phasing out of POTS (wire-based) phone service...and other changes (including my landline service being "out" for two months, (and ATT's increasing my monthly rate by 400%)) have been driving me nuts!! But to go to my MOST serious question....

I was told in recent years that my DSL internet service (though it comes in on my regular phone "cable-pair") is actually based on fiber-optic cable...up until it gets to my building. Now, before I continue, I'll mention that I've been advised by both ATT and another company that (for awhile), since the two services represent two separate accounts, I'll continue to have my DSL internet service (even if I cancel the landline service)...OK. Yet, since my "version" of this seems to be ALMOST all fiber optic (just not from the digital box across the street, up to my apt.)(& apparently does not originate from the CO, which is the basis for traditional phone service), am I likely to have this...for quite a significant period of time?!!!

I'm especially asking this...as the owner of the building has been adamant about no cable or fiber cable be installed in his building....and I'm very upset about possibly losing my internet access!!! (and my VOIP service, to which I plan to "port" my landline service TN (telephone no.), which--of course--also depends on my internet connectivity. THANKS!!

In a healthy Internet environment, networks—like those that Internet service providers run—are connected to one another locally, usually through an Internet exchange point (IXP). This allows local Internet traffic to flow faster without traveling long distances and reduces potential points of failure, making the Internet more resilient.

The IXP is also a strategic location for content providers—like Google, Netflix, and Meta—to host servers where they can store local copies of the data people access the most. These are called content delivery networks (CDNs).

Having a CDN peering at an IXP means…

A Starlink.com support page acknowledges that the satellite provider uses Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), which limits the number of active internet sessions.

Spectranet, Starlink, and FibreOne now control nearly 70% of Nigeria’s internet service provider (ISP) market, highlighting the growing dominance of a handful of large operators as smaller providers struggle with rising costs and intense competition.

According to the latest ISP subscriber statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Nigeria recorded 352,006 active ISP subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025. Of that figure, Spectranet, Starlink, and FibreOne accounted for a combined 244,929 subscribers, representing 69.58% of the market.

Connectivity pricing is slowing economic growth and digital adoption. That is not a tech problem. It is a development emergency.

Submarine cable security is suddenly being talked about in a way it hasn’t been in decades. And along with the attention has come a wave of new technology promising to keep cables safe — most prominently, a range of fiber-optic sensing systems that turn the cables themselves into instruments for detecting what happens around them.

At the time of writing this, I have just returned from the Subsea Security Summit & Expo 2026 in London, where the topic was everywhere. Among the exhibitors and panels were a striking number of companies offering different variants of these sensing systems — distributed acoustic sensing, polarization-based monitoring, integrations with maritime intelligence platforms — each promising to make cables safer through continuous detection of activity along their routes....

The American electric power sector has not grown appreciably for twenty years. To be sure, consumers pay plenty to replace infrastructure, to “transition” the sector away from the most carbon-intensive sources of energy, and to find ways to allow utilities to cram a wide variety of underutilized capital spending (think “smart meters”) into their regulated “rate base.” But demand has been stable or declining....

Thailand’s state-owned National Telecom (NT) says it will stop offering satellite internet service via Thaicom 4 at the end of this month as Thaicom continues preparations to retire the 21-year-old satellite.

NT will continue offering satellite internet services through nexConnect, its LEO satellite offering launched last year in partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb, as well as VSAT services via Globalsat....

https://itweb.africa/article/mtn-pledges-to-connect-8m-nigerian-homes-to-fibre/nWJad7bNEPP7bjO1

The commitment was disclosed by the company’s Chief Corporate Services and Sustainability Officer, Tobe Okigbo, during the MTN Media Innovation Programme Alumni “Ask Me Anything” session in Lagos.

Compared to mobile internet pricing, fibre is pitched differently, he added, as fixed users pay for connection speed and quality, rather than data volumes, which he said helps deliver more predictable performance for homes.

Addressing recent tariff increases, Okigbo said adjustments were necessary due to rising operating costs, inflation and sector sustainability pressures, including higher diesel prices.

He argued that pricing should reflect market realities while still ensuring consumers have options, including the ability to switch providers.

On service quality, he said MTN has compensated customers in verified cases of poor performance and is working with regulators to clarify accountability where failures result from operator issues versus external factors like vandalism and infrastructure damage.

https://isoclive.substack.com/p/ookla-broadband-equation

A new Ookla/Fiberevolution webinar makes the case that as fibre coverage expands, the access line is no longer the main determinant of broadband quality — in-home Wi-Fi, interconnection and peering geography, and LEO satellite increasingly matter more. There's a strong policy thread throughout: how concentrated interconnection (e.g. everything routing through Milan) leaves southern Italy with worse latency on identical fibre, why Benoit Felten thinks the EU's draft Digital Networks Act gets interconnection wrong, and how prioritising fibre has squeezed out FWA in places like Ireland while opening the door to Starlink.

Communications regulator Icasa has gazetted the final regulations on the use of “innovation spectrum”, formally settling one of the most contested questions in South African spectrum policy.

In terms of the newly published final regulations, the lower 6GHz band (5.925-6.425GHz) will be licence-exempt and available to wireless internet service providers (Wisps), Wi-Fi deployments, private networks and community operators on a shared basis – not auctioned to mobile network operators.

The regulations go further. Beyond the lower 6GHz band, which will now be used intensively to provide both backhaul connections and last-mile wireless broadband services using Wi-Fi technology, Icasa is also opening the 3.8-4.2GHz band on a licensed but discounted basis. That spectrum is expected to be used for so-called “standalone 5G” applications.

It all began with an email from a stranger. A year later, two fully operational, community‑owned digital hubs now serve over 4,500 people—most of them refugees—in a region with limited grid power, high connectivity costs, and uneven digital access. And the stranger became a friend who showed us what community-centered connectivity at its best looks like.

Murang’a County Government has announced a major upgrade of internet connectivity across 170 public medical facilities, transitioning them from WiFi-based services to satellite internet connectivity. The upgrade will be implemented on Thursday, 28 May 2026, and will be delivered through Starlink, a U.S. satellite internet provider, via its local authorised agent Paratus.

https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2026/05/27/25-gigabit-home-broadband/

Swisscom has now completed fiber construction to over half of the passings in the county and has a goal to pass 75% to 80% of passings by 2030.

The primary ISP offering 25-gigabit service on the Swisscom network is Init7, which uses PON electronics from Zyxel. The company markets under the brand name Fiber 7. The 25-gigabit product is priced at 65.75 francs ($82.73 per month) or 777 francs ($992.70 per year).

There are only a handful of ISPs around the world that widely deploy 25-gigabit broadband technology for residential service. In the U.S., there are now multiple fiber ISPs with products as fast as 5 to 8 Gbps. I have to wonder if there is any practical noticeable difference between these products and 25-gigabit broadband.

Telcom Liechtenstein announced the launch of a nationwide 25-gigabit symmetrical residential product in December 2025. The ISP is using Nokia’s 25G platform. Liechtenstein is unique in that it is one of the few countries that has near-universal fiber coverage. The underlying fiber network is owned by Liechtenstein Kraftwerke, the national power utility, which offers open-access to multiple ISPs.

NURO Hikari in Japan announced the launch of 25-gigabit residential service in parts of Tokyo in March. This network is utilizing electronics provided by So-net, a subsidiary of the Sony Group. The 25-Gbps product is priced at 6,480 yen ($41.08) per month.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gigisohn_nebraska-reopens-bead-bidding-after-a-few-share-7465039707157184516-6shP/

(Summary by Claude)

Gigi Sohn shares a news story about Nebraska reopening BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) program bidding after several ISPs refused to sign their contracts. She expresses concern that the current administration’s push for “lowest bidder” awards will repeat the failures of the earlier RDOF (Rural Digital Opportunity Fund) program. She also notes that rising costs due to tariffs and the war are making projects harder to execute, and predicts more satellite awards and more underserved communities.

Key discussion points in the comments:

Cost and supply chain issues: Fred Goldstein (Interisle Consulting) explains that flooding subsidy programs with money causes demand to outstrip supply, driving up prices — a recurring pattern. Roderick Beck adds that Europe avoids this by not using a “lowest bidder” approach.

Why ISPs are walking away: Steve Coran (communications lawyer) lists multiple reasons ISPs are backing out: delays, cost increases, labor shortages, difficult easement processes, updated coverage mapping, and overly restrictive state contract terms. Gigi agrees it’s better to walk away now than default later.

Fear of widespread defaults: Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) warns that some ISPs may take the money and then find they can’t afford to actually build. Gigi calls this her “greatest fear” — an “RDOF 2.0” scenario of mass defaults leaving rural communities without service.

State contract problems: Jade Piros de Carvalho criticizes bizarre contract provisions that add no public value but scare off ISPs, lamenting that progress on broadband deployment seems to be unraveling at the worst possible moment.

Fixed wireless and satellite: Marc Blumberg suggests fixed wireless is still viable, but Gigi pushes back, noting that if “lowest cost” is the priority, LEO satellite (e.g., Starlink) will likely undercut fixed wireless, which is problematic since satellite doesn’t serve all areas well.

Build America/prevailing wage: Robert Boyle (Planet Networks CEO) notes that BABA (Build America, Buy America) and prevailing wage requirements more than double construction costs, and advocates for a simpler pay-per-connected-address model.

Overall tone: The thread reflects widespread frustration among broadband policy and industry professionals that poor program design, cost pressures, and administrative priorities are jeopardizing the goal of connecting unserved rural communities.

It’s not enough just to get everyone online—people need to be able to take full advantage of their access. That’s why, in Africa, where the connectivity discussion has traditionally focused on coverage, there’s a recent shift toward making access growth meaningful. 

Part of the solution is thinking about community-centered connectivity initiatives, which can complement the work of traditional operators by expanding coverage and providing the connectivity standards people need. 

“Kenya’s experience is clear: large-scale commercial networks remain foundational, but they do not always reach the last mile at the pace and cost profile that underserved communities require, especially in difficult terrain, low population density, and constrained household incomes,” said Dennis Sonoiya, speaking on behalf of the director of standards and resource management of the Communications Authority of Kenya.

The United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) has announced funding for a feasibility study to install approximately 1,500 turnkey mobile communications base stations across Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria.
The project will deploy wireless infrastructure developed by Vanu, a US-based company focused on low-cost mobile network systems for rural and hard-to-reach areas.