To close Montana’s digital divide, the Montana Broadband Office created a Digital Opportunity Plan, which addresses broadband adoption barriers in four main areas: availability, service affordability, device access, and digital skills. To implement MBO's plans in each of these areas, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded the office over $6.9 million in Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program funding. MBO's key activities include:

• Upgrading facility access for the Montana School for the Deaf & Blind to support distance learning across Montana;
• Expanding the Last Mile Prison Coding and Web Development Program for the Montana Department of Corrections; and
• Connecting rural Montanans to workforce development and other essential services through the Montana Prosperity Portal.

Here is a look at MBO's full slate of planned activities, the timeline for executing its Digital Opportunity Plan, and the plan's alignment with other Montana priorities.

We just spent a few years agonizing over the Federal Communications Committee broadband maps. The reasons we’ve cared is easy to understand. The FCC maps were first used to allocate Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment funding to states. States that spent a lot of time to clean up the maps seem to have gotten a better share of the BEAD funding. We’ll soon be at the end of the BEAD map challenges, and that makes me wonder if anybody will ever care about the FCC maps after this. I’m positive that when BEAD is over, the FCC and everybody else will lose interest in the broadband maps. I also believe that we’ll still have millions of rural homes without a good broadband option. I predict that states that still want to solve the remaining broadband gaps will revert to creating their own state maps like they did before BEAD. But for the most part, rural broadband will be claimed to be solved—until the day comes when the FCC is forced to increase the definition of broadband speed again—and then we’ll start all over.