Carl Weinschenk

Comporium won a grant to increase broadband speeds in some areas of Transylvania County (NC) via a $2.8 million grant from North Carolina’s Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) Program. The improvements will require a total of more than $7 million to complete. The grant will help bring 1 Gbps service to more than 800 customers. It will feature construction of 105 miles of fiber in partnership with the Haywood Electric Membership Corp. The project is expected to take two years from the start date, which has not yet been established.

The percentage of broadband households that had a remote healthcare visit increased from 15% in 2019 to 41% in 2020, according to a telehealth adoption report from Parks Associates. The firm also found that 29% of respondents are very likely to add at least one health related product during the next year. About half of parents of children under 18 years of age have “high intent” to add a connected medical product. That group is followed by current telehealth service users at a bit over 40%. About 25% of all U.S. broadband households are likely to do so.

CARES Act broadband funding helped enable the town of Bristol, New Hampshire, to deploy 24 miles of fiber to pass 400 Bristol residences and connect to Plymouth State University. The CARES Act funding was a $1.52 million grant. In a separate project, additional fiber backbone and fiber distribution will be deployed to connect all Bristol municipal, educational and commercial buildings with funding through a Northern Border Regional Commission grant and town appropriation.

In what they say is a first, five electric cooperatives in three states have formed an association of broadband co-ops aimed at bolstering services in underserved rural areas. The Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Association of Broadband Cooperatives (VMDABC) is structurally modeled after existing cooperative associations. VMDABC will offer classes of membership based on types of co-op members and their goals. VMDABC classes of membership will include co-op affiliates offering retail fiber, co-ops pursuing middle mile or “backbone” fiber, other broadband entities, and vendors.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has asked the Federal Communications Commission to reject efforts by West Virginia legislators to block Frontier Communications’ successful bid for Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) funding. Frontier won $247 million to serve almost 79,000 locations in the state. It says that it will bring gigabit connectivity to many of those locations. The company is currently in bankruptcy, but expects to emerge in the first quarter of 2021.

C Spire is adding 15 community colleges to the Mississippi Optical Network (MissiON). The MissiON network is the research and education network supporting universities in the state. The 15 community colleges – which are not identified in the press release – will gain additional capacity and fully redundant connectivity to commodity Internet services and state university research programs, according to C Spire. C Spire has been quite involved with MissiON, having previously added universities to the network and “enhanced connections” to the network for others.

RootMetrics compared mobile broadband speeds between the first half of 2014 and the second half of 2019. Among the four national wireless carriers, Verizon has already increased its mobile broadband speed the most. Verizon’s rolling average median download speed across 125 markets generally outstripped other carriers in measures taken twice yearly during the time frame. AT&T and T-Mobile became serious challengers in 2017, with all carriers showing considerable mobile broadband speed gains, the comparisons show.

With wireless use set to spike as more people work from home during the coronavirus, or COVID-19, pandemic, wireless spectrum holders are working together to most efficiently use the available spectrum. That has led carriers and spectrum holders to temporarily put competition aside and enter wireless spectrum lending arrangements. The goal is to expand voice, video and data capacity where it is needed as work, as education and as commerce shifts to the home from the office, school and store.

Smithville Communications and SCI REMC–a rural telecommunications provider and an electric cooperative, respectively–are teaming to build fiber-based broadband infrastructure to serve their common Indiana service areas. The telco electric cooperative fiber partnership project will serve about 3,400 residents and businesses in Ellettsville, Lake Monroe and Gosport (IN) communities with homes served by copper-based services.

The newly enacted 2019 Wisconsin Act 128 incentivizes rural broadband investment through targeted tax exemptions. Telephone companies will get an exemption for property used to provide broadband service in rural or underserved areas. Most Wisconsin property taxes are paid to local governments. The telephone company property tax, however, is paid to and controlled by the state. This means that the bill will have no fiscal impact on local governments, according to a press release from WSTA — Wisconsin’s Broadband Association.