Fierce

As the US government slowly works its way toward allocating $42.5 billion in broadband funding and concerns about Federal Communication Commission's broadband maps reach a fever pitch, the most marginalized communities in unserved locales are waiting.

Fixed wireless and fiber provider Rise Broadband has been acquired by private equity firm GI Partners – a move that will propel Rise’s fiber-to-the-home deployments in the rural US, the companies said. GI Partners and Rise aim to “execute a multi-year, fiber-based network expansion effort,” according to Brendan Collins, managing director and co-head of GI Data Infrastructure.

Comcast exited 2022 with several thousand fewer employees than it had the year prior, but cable rival Charter Communications significantly expanded its own workforce over the same period. The changes highlight the different approaches the operators are taking to cut costs and drive efficiency as macroeconomic challenges mount. It’s not necessarily a surprise that Comcast’s employee count dropped given the operator confirmed layoffs in its cable field organization and media divisions in recent months.

Frontier Communications’ multi-year fiber expansion roadmap calls for it to ramp deployments to hit 1.6 million new passings in 2023 and it looks like a decent chunk of those will be in West Virginia. The operator unveiled plans to invest $100 million to hit 100,000 additional locations in the state this year alone. The new passings will build on the more than 125,000 Frontier has already built in the state over the past two years.