Stephanie Kanowitz

Iowa’s Department of Management (DOM) is kicking off a series of 50-plus town hall-style meetings to learn directly from residents what broadband and digital services they need. The in-person meetings, which DOM announced on March 6, started on March 14 and will run through late May. They will cover four topic areas: accessibility, affordability, digital devices, and digital skills. One reason the meetings are not available virtually is to emphasize local, in-person participation, said Matt Behrens, the state’s chief information officer.

If the five companies using the most broadband bandwidth contribute more to the costs of providing it, they could help address the digital divide. Roslyn Layton, a vice president at Strand Consult, researched four rural broadband providers and found that 75 percent of downstream network traffic comes from five companies: Amazon Prime, Disney+/Hulu, Microsoft Xbox, Netflix and YouTube.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for county and city governments to provide their workers and K-12 students with internet connections and related technology, especially laptops, experts said during a June 4 CompTIA webinar titled “Stretching the Limits: Broadband Capacity and Availability in a Crisis.” Albemarle County (VA) a largely rural area that is home to the University of Virginia, partnered with its public schools division to provide surplus laptops to social service workers who didn’t have them.

AT&T reports that FirstNet -- the high-speed, nationwide wireless broadband network it’s building for use by first responders -- is performing well. More than 1.2 million first responders and other emergency response workers have connectivity. Additionally, more than 11,000 public-safety agencies and organizations nationwide have subscribed to the network, which gives responders preemption across voice and data with multiple priority levels that they can apportion as needed, too.