Broadband Breakfast on August 5, 2026 – How Broadband Can Kickstart Rural Economic Development
As new funding expands access in high-cost areas, the challenge is ensuring these networks translate into sustained economic activity.
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Broadband is increasingly linked to measurable economic gains in rural areas, with high-adoption communities seeing stronger business formation, higher GDP growth, and rising incomes. It enables local businesses to reach wider markets, supports remote work, and expands access to services like education, healthcare, and digital tools for agriculture and small enterprises. As new funding expands access in high-cost areas, the challenge is ensuring these networks translate into sustained economic activity. This BroadbandLive event will examine how rural communities are structuring broadband investments to drive long-term growth and resilience.
Broadband Breakfast
Panelists
- Bartlett Cleland, Executive Director, Innovation Economy Alliance
- Jonathan Chambers, Co-CEO, Conexon
- Amy Huffman, Policy Director, National Digital Inclusion Alliance
- Drew Clark (moderator), CEO and Publisher, Broadband Breakfast
Bartlett Cleland serves as Executive Director for the Innovation Economy Alliance. Bartlett’s decades of work on technology and innovation in public policy have been informed by his broad array of work and education outside of traditional public policy channels. Whether relying on his business background of MBA, work at a human resources consulting firm or as a CEO, he seeks to make every policy debate relevant to what happens to real people and to real business. He has spent decades working for public policy think tanks, technology trade associations, social welfare organizations and on Capitol Hill.
For 35 years, Jonathan Chambers has influenced the development of government telecommunications policies and the deployment of internet access networks. Early in his career, Chambers served as the Republican staff director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. During that time, the Committee overhauled most of the federal laws that still govern the wireless, cable, telephone, and internet access industries. Chambers later served as FCC Chief of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, where he was an advocate for reforms that altered annual FCC spending from support of voice services to support of broadband services and from incumbent subsidies to competitive bidding.
Amy Huffman joined NDIA in 2021. She is a public servant, systems thinker, innovative policy expert, and a storyteller with a passion for closing the digital divide and ensuring all Americans can thrive in the 21st-century’s digital world. Amy has studied and worked in the digital inclusion field since 2011. Prior to joining NDIA, Amy served as the State of North Carolina’s first digital inclusion and policy manager for the Broadband Infrastructure Office, a division of the Department of Information Technology. Government Technology named Amy one of the nation’s Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers of 2024 for her work supporting states implement the Digital Equity Act. Amy holds a master’s degree in public administration and a bachelor’s degree in political science from UNC-Chapel Hill.
Breakfast Media LLC CEO Drew Clark has led the Broadband Breakfast community since 2008. An early proponent of better broadband, better lives, he initially founded the Broadband Census crowdsourcing tool to collect and verify broadband data left unpublished by the Federal Communications Commission. As CEO and Publisher, Clark presides over the leading media community advocating for higher-capacity internet everywhere through topical, timely and intelligent coverage. Clark also served as head of the Partnership for a Connected Illinois, a state broadband initiative.
