The Federal Communications Commission announced that it is committing $37 million in the 13th wave of Emergency Connectivity Fund program support, helping to close the Homework Gap. This latest round of funding is supporting over 170 schools, 30 libraries, and 4 consortia across the country, including students in Alaska, Indiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Texas. On April 28, the FCC will open a third application filing window that closes May 13, 2022 for eligible equipment and services to be delivered or received in the upcoming school year. During this third application filing window, eligible schools and libraries can submit requests for funding to purchase eligible equipment and up to 12 months of recurring services between July 1, 2022, and December 31, 2023. Given past demand, the third application filing window will likely be the last opportunity for schools and libraries to request funding before the remaining Emergency Connectivity Funds are exhausted. Total commitments to date have funded over 10 million connected devices and 5 million broadband connections. This announcement includes nearly $27 million in commitments from Window 1 applications and over $10 million in commitments from Window 2 applications.

Section 80401 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act new law allows for the use of private activity bond financing for qualified broadband projects. It’s an interesting new form of financing that has never been easily available to commercial internet service providers before. This bond funding can only be used for projects that fit the criteria for broadband projects that are covered by the other provisions of the Infrastructure Act. Specifically, the bonds can only be used to finance a project that "is designed to provide broadband service solely to 1 or more census block groups in which more than 50 percent of residential households do not have access to fixed, terrestrial broadband service which delivers at least 25 Mbps downstream and at least 3 Mbps upstream," and "results in internet access to residential locations, commercial locations, or a combination of residential ad commercial locations at speeds not less than 100 Mbps for download and 20 Mbps for uploads, but only if at least 90 percent of the locations provided such access under the project are locations where, before the project, a broadband provider did not provide service, or did not provide service meeting the minimum speed requirement." This means the projects can only be used for areas that have at least 50 percent coverage of homes with current broadband of 25/3 or less. That’s likely to mean that this bond funding is going to have a relatively short shelf life – once Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program grants are done, there may not be a whole lot of the US left that will meet this test.

[Doug Dawson is President of CCG Consulting.]

In October 2021, the Broadband Development Group was hired to develop a comprehensive master plan for how the state of Arkansas should approach the inequitable availability of broadband service across the state. "Significant progress has already been made to overcome the state’s broadband problem with plans in place to make even more progress," says the Broadband Development Group (BDG) report. BDG recommends Arkansas focus its efforts on providing broadband service to the remaining 110,000 underserved households not currently served by any federal grants. The expected cost for this effort is roughly up to $550 million and can be funded through American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) grants. BDG also includes modifications that would improve the Arkansas Rural Connect (ARC) Program. This includes establishing competitive bidding for grants, requiring affordability on rates, and future-proofing technology deployment using fiber infrastructure.

Sterling, a town of about 8,000 in Worcester County (MA), has become another example of a community controlling its broadband destiny. The Sterling Municipal Light Department (SMLD) is building the Local Area Municipal Broadband (LAMB) network, which will bring fiber-based internet to Sterling’s residents and businesses. Set to be fully completed in the fourth quarter of 2024, SMLD will proactively notify residents as construction begins in their neighborhoods. “When Darren Borge, general manager for SMLD, came up with the LAMB name, you could not believe the response from the locals who think it’s a great name,” says Bill Underhill, network coordinator at SMLD. “We’re stressing the local part.” Unlike an incumbent service provider or large electric power company, SMLD focuses on improving residents’ lives. “We are owned by the people we serve, so we have to answer to them,” says Borge. “We can bring next-gen services to our little town of Sterling to help our residents save wherever they can. SMLD benefits everyone – it gives them a stronger robust electric system and now the internet.”

Early in my career in search engine optimization, I was working with an SEO consultant on a particular website project, who gave me some words of wisdom: A website is a building. A domain was brick and mortar, a sitemap was a hallway, webpages were a series of rooms. It was a compelling metaphor, one I kept returning to as I worked on optimizing and organizing the site’s pages. But the project became more complicated the longer I worked on it: Instead of finding a neatly ordered site structure, I found chaos. In the CMS were hundreds of broken links. On the blogs, old branding sat uncomfortably next to new design. Orphaned pages were hidden and sealed off in various, unexpected locations. There was, in other words, a monstrous version of the site lurking just beneath the public-facing one.