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As the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) winds down, federal officials are hopeful Congress will reauthorize funding for the widely popular project that helps subsidize monthly Internet service for low-income households. “This program is making a difference.

North Carolina is moving forward with a digital equity grant program to bring broadband access into more underserved homes, as part of a larger mission to have all of these homes connected to the Internet by 2029. The North Carolina Department of Information Technology’s (NCDIT) Office of Digital Equity and Literacy will award $14 million in grants to community organizations such as local nonprofits, libraries, educational institutions and others.

Cities are looking to leverage streetlights and even electric transformers to give them deeper insights into what’s happening on the ground. These technology developments come as public leaders also work to ensure individual privacy is not trampled on the road to a smart city. Many of the questions from city leaders involve how data is transported and stored, said Mike Grigsby, director of business development at Ubicquia, a smart city technology company. “The data is owned by the city,” Grigsby said.

Thanks largely to the federal infrastructure law and incoming funding, now is the time to develop the sorts of public-private partnerships to grow broadband access for all residents and businesses, experts contend. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. It’s probably a once-in-a-century moment. This is the moment in which we will solve many of our broadband problems, as a nation,” said Joanne Hovis, president of CTC Technology & Energy [andBenton Institute for Broadband & Society Board Member]. Collaborations between the public and private sectors can take many forms.

Issues around equity, access to broadband and the broader social ills related to racism are finding a stronger foothold in smart city strategies. The compounding events of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, its related economic fallout and nationwide protests calling attention to unjust policing and systematic racism are redefining how cities use technology as an instrument for achieving community goals. The coronavirus crisis, which either idled large segments of the economy or required workers to go remote, has laid bare lingering problems like the digital divide, as smart city leaders rethin

The San Jose Digital Inclusion Fund in California was established about a year ago as a mechanism for closing the digital divide in this largely affluent San Francisco Bay Area city, part of Silicon Valley.

A partnership between the telecommunications company and technology company NEC is looking at whether the fiber-optic networks coursing through cities can be used to glean real-world intelligence. Vehicle counts, traffic slow-downs and other pieces of data central to traffic management may one day be gleaned from a city’s fiber-optic communications network.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has launched its new Broadband Research Initiative to understand why some 24 million Americans — most of those living in rural communities — still lack what is largely now considered a basic utility. “About 30 percent of rural Americans do not have access to broadband, compared to about 2 percent of urban Americans,” said Kathryn de Wit, manager of Pew’s Broadband Research Initiative. “So while there is that big gap, I don’t think that this is a policy issue that’s split very neatly along urban and rural lines,” she continued.

A Q&A with Garrett Dunwoody, who oversees the Information Systems and Technology Department at the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD), which manages and protects 63,000 acres down the middle of the San Francisco Peninsula into San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in California. 

The close working relationship between Verizon and information technology officials in Sacramento (CA) could turn out to be a model for communities across the country as cities move forward with smart city projects and the high-capacity communications networks needed to support them. About two years ago, Verizon approached the city to launch a 5G, fiber-optic build-out, with Sacramento as Verizon’s first foray into launching 5G.