Access
Rural broadband and internet access
Support for established non-profits expanding service and affordability in rural and under-connected parts of the United States — the last mile, and the middle mile that makes the last mile worth having.
Increase Bandwidth · Reduce Latency
Fast, open, resilient internet shouldn't depend on where you live.
The IBRL Institute is a non-profit working to promote digital connectivity — improving the accessibility, performance, and resiliency of internet infrastructure for underserved communities and the public at large.
Mission
Connectivity is public infrastructure, and it is unevenly built.
Most of the internet's hard problems are not consumer problems. They live in the parts nobody markets: the last mile into a small town, the regional exchange that was never built, the routing arrangement that sends a video call four hundred miles in the wrong direction, the open-source daemon a thousand networks depend on that one maintainer keeps alive after work.
The IBRL Institute exists to put resources behind that layer. We support organizations, engineers, and projects working to make internet infrastructure more accessible, faster, and more resilient — with particular attention to the communities that get served last and worst.
Focus areas
Where we're concentrating.
Four areas where modest, well-placed support changes what's possible for the people building and maintaining the network.
Sustainability
Data center energy and efficiency
The compute the internet now runs on carries a real energy footprint. We're looking at work that makes data center power use more efficient, more transparent, and more accountable to the communities hosting it.
Maintenance
Open-source network infrastructure
Routing daemons, measurement tooling, time synchronization, packet processing — the unglamorous software engineers everywhere rely on. We fund the projects it would be a crisis to lose, guided by input from the engineers who actually run them.
Advocacy
Digital rights and network policy
Organizations advancing digital rights, data privacy, and sound public policy on network infrastructure — because how the network is governed decides who it ends up serving.
Programs
Three ways we help fund.
Grants
Direct support to non-profits
Small, unrestricted grants to established non-profit organizations whose work advances access, performance, or resiliency. Small grants placed early tend to reach further than large ones placed late.
Open source
Funding for critical projects
Financial support for the open-source projects network infrastructure is built on. We ask working engineers which projects are load-bearing and underfunded, and we start there.
Research
Publication and presentation honoraria
Honoraria for engineers who write technical papers or present at conferences on network infrastructure. Knowledge that stays inside one operator's runbook helps one operator; published, it helps everyone.
How we operate
Listen. Fund. Publish.
- Fund, don't run
- We back organizations and people already doing the work rather than standing up programs that compete with them.
- Ask the operators
- Our sense of what's underfunded comes from the engineers who maintain and depend on this infrastructure, not from a distance.
- Publish the work
- Technical knowledge about how networks actually behave belongs in the open literature, not locked in private post-mortems.
- Start small, learn fast
- Modest grants let us test whether support lands where it's needed before committing to more of it.
Get in touch
If you build, maintain, or fund this layer — we'd like to hear from you.
We're especially interested in hearing from engineers about open-source projects that are load-bearing and underfunded, and from non-profits working on access in under-connected regions.
Tell us what you work on and what would actually help. Concrete asks — a maintainer's time, a hardware line item, travel to present findings — are easier for us to act on than general interest.