North Carolina Charts Broadband Expansion Plans

As state and local governments look ahead to applying for broadband grants that are part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, some governments are not waiting around for that new federal money to get started on their efforts to expand access to high-speed internet service. North Carolina boasts one of those state governments, having laid out a plan to use more than $960 million from earlier rounds of federal funding to try to close the state’s digital divide by 2025. North Carolina CIO Jim Weaver said that the state aims to be a “top-five state” for broadband adoption by 2025, StateScoop previously reported. The state plans to encourage the deployment of critical broadband infrastructure and improve digital literacy and the adoption of broadband. North Carolina also wants to expand broadband to enable telemedicine, remote work and online learning across the state, according to Weaver. “The structure is in place to hit the ground running with the funding from both the state budget and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and to make these investments effective,” Weaver said. One of the first tasks that North Carolina — and other states such as Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia — will undertake is to create more accurate broadband coverage maps than the ones currently available from the Federal Communications Commission, as reported by The Washington Post.