Analysis

This is the second in a four-part series about the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) digital equity and broadband grant Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) announcements from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Sifting through the Digital Equity Act (DEA) NOFO, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) identified the following highlights:

Low-income Americans are discerning broadband consumers who are well-attuned to the nuances of service plans, in the midst of dealing with internet service bills that are often a burden on their household budgets. The indispensability of internet access—a need the pandemic has underscored—places service quality next to affordability in the minds of low-income consumers.

Digital food access could be a game-changer for people who struggle with brick-and-mortar food access barriers, including those living in disinvested areas historically defined as “food deserts” and individuals facing mobility challenges or time constraints.

Sean McDevitt, a partner at Arthur D. Little, a consulting firm that largely works for the giant ISPs, says cable companies are not likely to universally upgrade broadband networks in the future. In the past, when a cable company migrated from DOCSIS 1.0, to 2.0, and to 3.0 everybody in a community was upgraded to the latest technology. He says going forward that it’s almost certain that there will not be across-the-board upgrades.

Since the national dialog has suddenly fixated on inflation, the big ISPs decided to jump into the discussion by claiming that broadband prices are falling. The big ISP industry has been trotting out this untruth for the last several years. What underlies this claim is that the cost per megabit of speed has been falling as ISPs increase speeds. By definition, when an ISP upgrades a customer from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps, the cost per megabit drops. While the cable companies have been unilaterally increasing speeds, consumers have not seen the check they write each month drop.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to implement a comprehensive overhaul of its existing broadband data mapping and collection process with a new Broadband Data Collection (BDC) program. Under the BDC, all facilities-based providers of fixed and mobile broadband Internet access services will be required to submit broadband data on a biannual basis. As discussed below, the initial filing window is between June 30, 2022, and September 1, 2022. Ensuring nationwide access to affordable high-speed broadband service is a national priority.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) will put $42.45 billion into broadband buildout, to be distributed by the states. Less than a year earlier, the FCC’s high-cost Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) committed $9 billion for rural buildout and subsidies in some of the same areas. Here, I explore which RDOF areas are likely to get funded, what that means for the remaining unserved locations, and the amount of funding each state will have for each remaining unserved location.

As you might expect, the lobbying is becoming hot and heavy to position internet service providers (ISPs) to win the $42.5 billion of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants that will likely start being awarded in 2023. This is one of the most interesting lobbying challenges I’ve ever seen because there is no one central place that will be awarding these grants. Congress gave the responsibility for these grants to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), but the money is going to flow from them to the states.

On April 19, Governor JB Pritzker (D-IL) signed the 2023 Illinois state budget into law. Included in the 500+ page legislation is the Broadband Infrastructure Advancement Act (P.A. 102-0699), the state's overarching procedures to make use of coming federal monies to support broadband deployment projects.

I’m not sure that most people understand the extent to which our online experience has moved to the cloud – and this movement to the cloud means we’re using a lot more bandwidth than in the recent past. A huge number of online functions now reside in the cloud, when only a few years ago a lot of processing was done on our computers. The shift to the cloud is still an ongoing transition and there are still plenty of software packages that are not processed in the cloud, but it’s obvious that everything will eventually be in the cloud.