Keller and Heckman Senior Counsel Jim Baller Honored with Star Award by the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA)

James (Jim) Baller, Senior Counsel with Keller and Heckman’s Telecommunications practice, received the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA)’s Star Award at FBA’s Fiber Connect 2024 conference on July 29, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee.

The FBA is the largest and only trade association that represents the complete fiber ecosystem of service providers, manufacturers, industry experts, and deployment specialists dedicated to the advancement of fiber broadband deployment and the pursuit of a world where communications are limitless, advancing quality of life and digital equity anywhere and everywhere. The FBA helps providers, communities, and policymakers make informed decisions about how, where, and why to build better fiber broadband networks.

Each year, the FBA hosts the Fiber Connect conference to bring industry leaders together to discuss the latest broadband developments and trends, while also recognizing the best and brightest innovators within the field.

Jim received the Star Award for demonstrating “a lifetime of steadfast leadership, expert guidance, and unfailing optimism that has been critical to the success and widespread availability of community fiber broadband networks,” explained the FBA in their press release.

“I am deeply grateful to the FBA for this award,” Jim stated. “The FBA and I have been strong allies since its inception as the Fiber to the Home Council in 2001, and this award underscores the FBA’s recognition of the importance of community broadband initiatives and partnerships in achieving our shared goals.”

The FBA’s Star Award is the second major award that Jim has received this year. On May 1, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance honored Jim with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his decades of policy work at the federal, state, and local levels in support of local community broadband choice and for his work on scores of site-specific broadband projects.

Jim’s impact on the broadband industry also includes founding and serving as president of the U.S. Broadband Coalition, which helped foster a national consensus on the need for a national broadband strategy and recommended the framework for such a strategy reflected in the Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Plan. He was also the co-founder and president of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice. At Keller and Heckman, Jim represents clients across the United States in a wide range of communications matters, including battling barriers to community broadband initiatives, providing the legal services supporting high-capacity broadband networks, developing public-private broadband partnerships, siting wireless facilities, managing rights-of-way and easements, and negotiating attachments to poles, conduits, towers, and other broadband infrastructure.

About Keller and Heckman 

Keller and Heckman LLP is an internationally renowned law firm with a broad practice in the areas of regulatory law, public policy, and litigation. From offices around the world, our attorneys represent global companies and trade associations servicing a range of industries, including telecommunications, advertising and promotions, food and food additives, tobacco and e-vapor, plastics, pesticides, industrial and specialty chemicals, consumer products, drugs and medical devices, and transportation. Keller and Heckman is a pioneer in the use of interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving with an in-house scientific staff that works closely with the attorneys on matters of technical complexity.