Universal Broadband

According to state broadband officials in Michigan, Vermont and Pennsylvania, the termination of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) could not only impact the 23 million households on the program, but also those who live in areas where broadband is being built out. In Michigan, for instance, the state wants to require broadband companies receiving grants under the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program to charge lower-income people no more than $30 a month.

Minnesota didn’t wait for the federal government’s help to make funding available for rural broadband deployments. The state’s Border to Border program is often cited as a model for rural broadband funding.

I am writing to provide an update on the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which is on the brink of shutting down due to lack of funding.  This program is the largest broadband affordability effort in our Nation’s history.  Today, more than 23 million households nationwide count on it to get online and stay online, including vulnerable seniors, veterans, school-aged children, and residents of rural and Tribal communities.

The importance of high-speed internet was seared into the American psyche by scenes of children sitting in parking lots and outside fast-food restaurants to attend school online during the COVID-19 pandemic. During that same period, health care providers and patients like Cindy Westman say being connected also became a vital part of today’s health care delivery system. Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) participant Westman said her internet connection has become so important to her access to health care she would sell “anything that I own” to stay connected.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced 30 new “categorical exclusions” established to support National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews for broadband infrastructure deployments funded by the Internet for All programs.

A private equity firm based in Canada may prevent a lot of rural US Midwesterners from getting fiber broadband. But that’s OK with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) because it’s all perfectly legal. Mercury Broadband, which is majority owned by the private equity firm Northleaf Capital Partners, has claimed it covers vast swathes of Michigan, Kansas and Indiana with its fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband service.

Over a quarter of states are expected to be able to have enough Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding to get broadband to all their unserved and underserved areas and still have money left. At the other end of the spectrum, some states are struggling to meet national goals of making broadband available to everyone and to deploy fiber to the maximum extent possible.

Choice Broadband, the wireless broadband branch of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, and Tarana Wireless have officially launched a new ngFWA broadband network in Tohatchi, New Mexico. This is the first of many upgraded networks that will equip residents and businesses of Navajo Nation, the largest indigenous tribe in the United States, with reliable, high-speed internet. In Tohatchi, rocky terrain and significant distances between homes makes trenching fiber for broadband access extremely costly.

On March 29, the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program.

In 2020, we manually checked availability of more than 11,000 addresses using Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Form 477 data as the “source of truth.” Based on the results, we estimated that as many as 42 million Americans did not have the ability to purchase broadband internet at the time. Since then, quite a bit has changed.