About Tyler Cooper
Tyler Cooper is the Editor-in-Chief at BroadbandNow, where he directs national coverage of telecom policy and leads independent research on the digital divide. A former network and AV system designer with more than a decade in the telecom industry, he has been writing about broadband since 2015, and his work has been cited by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and in the Oxford journal International Affairs.
Background
Tyler Cooper is the Editor-in-Chief at BroadbandNow. BroadbandNow and its analytics arm, BroadbandNow Research, cover social, economic and political issues related to broadband technology — digital inclusion, municipal broadband, telecom legislation, emerging technologies, and the impact of broadband on everyday life.
The broadband deployment savings the U.S. squandered by failing to adopt a national “Dig Once” conduit policy — quantified in Tyler’s most-cited report and referenced across federal infrastructure debates.
Tyler leads BroadbandNow Research’s independent audits of federal broadband data, including the landmark study that manually verified more than 110,000 address-provider combinations and found that 42 million Americans lacked access to broadband — nearly double the FCC’s estimate at the time. That research was cited by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in its 2022 report to Congress calling for a national broadband strategy, and helped drive the national shift toward location-level broadband mapping.
His original reporting has also entered the academic record: Tyler’s investigation into Big Tech’s ownership of the internet backbone — which found Google owns or co-owns tens of thousands of miles of submarine cable — was cited in the Oxford journal International Affairs in research on “virtual sovereignty” and private infrastructural power.
International Affairs (Oxford)
VentureBeat
TechRadar
VICE
Fox News
NPR
Tyler’s work is internationally recognized; he has been published on sites like VentureBeat, TechRadar, Digital Trends, and The Next Web. He has also been featured in VICE and Fox News. He also works alongside PCMag’s Eric Griffith on the publication’s annual Best Internet Service Providers rankings.
Tyler is an active speaker at industry conferences and events, such as the National Digital Inclusion Alliance’s Net Inclusion 2020 conference, NPR’s “In Conversation,” Broadband Breakfast’s “Broadband Breakfast Live Online,” and the Broadband Measurement Summit in Washington, D.C., where he spoke in 2024. He has been writing about broadband issues like the digital divide, net neutrality, cybersecurity and internet access since 2015, and is the creator and host of The BroadbandNow Podcast, where he has interviewed policy leaders on BEAD implementation, telehealth, and broadband adoption.
Professional Background & Education
✓ Research cited by the U.S. GAO
✓ Cited in International Affairs (Oxford)
✓ Former enterprise network & AV system designer
Before turning to journalism full-time, Tyler was a System Designer at HomePro, Inc., where he designed, implemented and maintained enterprise-grade network architecture, automation solutions and home theater technology for custom home builders across the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. That hands-on experience with the physical infrastructure of connectivity grounds his policy analysis and product reviews in technical reality. He began writing professionally in 2015, working as a staff reporter and freelance journalist covering consumer products, services and technology before joining BroadbandNow.
Previously Published
Tyler has created and contributed to some of the most influential and frequently cited reports examining broadband deployment in the U.S. today:
Personal
Tyler is a multi-instrumentalist and hobbyist composer; he spends most of his time outside of work on music. A Dallas/Fort Worth native, his 2019 study of the digital divide mapped the connectivity gaps in his own backyard.