Looking a little further ahead

Innovation & Research

We don’t just deliver affordable internet today. We research how people will stay connected tomorrow — especially in rural and underserved communities.

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A telecommunications tower above a green community landscape — Research with a local purpose

Why it matters

The future of connection should belong to the people who use it.

Our mission is simple: make connection affordable, accessible, and community-owned. That mission does not stop at the services we offer today.

New ways of building networks could help lower costs, reach places traditional systems overlook, and give communities more say in how their connection works. Research helps us understand what is genuinely useful before we ask anyone to rely on it.

Curious about what could make local connection more affordable and more resilient.

What we’re exploring

A network that can be shared, not just subscribed to.

One current area of study is decentralized networking — a different way for information to travel from one place to another.

Current research interest

NKN — New Kind of Network

NKN is a peer-to-peer network where independent nodes can share bandwidth and relay data, instead of having every connection depend on a few big centralized carriers. In the NKN model, the people and hardware helping carry traffic can be rewarded for that work.

We’re studying whether an approach like this could become part of a future connection backend for communities like ours. It is a research interest — not a finished product or a promise about what we will offer next.

What we’re exploring

Open questions

Could sharing capacity help reduce the cost of reaching more people?

Could more distributed systems give rural communities greater control?

What would it take to make new technology practical and welcoming?

A cooperative fit

Technology works better when people have a hand in it.

Decentralized networking is interesting to us because its shape echoes the cooperative model: many people contributing to something useful together.

Community-owned

The people using the network can have a voice in how it develops and serves them.

More resilient

A system with many connected parts can avoid depending on one single point of failure.

Shared capacity

Everyday people could contribute capacity to a network that helps their own community.

Let’s explore what’s next

Have a question, an idea, or a possible partnership?

We’d like to hear from researchers, technology partners, funders, and community members who care about fairer ways to stay connected.

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