The short time frame for many state grants is out of synch with the reality of the way that internet service providers (ISPs) can add customers to a network. Grants generally pay only for the capital cost of assets. The largest cost for fiber grants is likely the cost of the fiber running up and down streets to pass customers. The second largest cost in many grants is the fiber drops that connect from the street to customers. In short, an ISP has two concerns with a grant with a short timeframe. Make sure to ask for enough money upfront. If you only ask for enough money to install 50 percent of customers and then exceed that, then you won’t get extra grant money to cover them. But on the flip side, an ISP must realize that there is often going to be a good chance of not meeting the target penetration rate in a short-term grant. Even if you eventually get 75 percent households in a grant area, the grant will only reimburse you for customers who were installed before the last day covered by the grant period. For short grants of two years, that means starting the sales process early and diligently to get customers sold and installed before the funding clock runs out.

[Doug Dawson is President of CCG Consulting.]

AT&T is opening a new Connected Learning Center inside the Asian Pacific American Community Center (APACC) in San Francisco (CA) to provide internet access and education tools to those who face connectivity barriers vital to their long-term success. It’s part of the AT&T Connected Learning initiative and the company's $2 billion commitment to address the digital divide through internet accessibility, affordability and safe adoption. This is the second Connected Learning Center that AT&T has opened in California. In December 2021, AT&T opened an AT&T Connected Learning Center in Los Angeles (CA). In all, AT&T is opening more than 20 centers across the country. The goal of the centers is to encourage more families to get connected through free access to the internet and education resources that teach the value of broadband and how to use it safely and effectively. Centers will be housed within local organizations that support underserved populations, including some of our nation’s most vulnerable students and families. The new center will help to bridge the digital divide by providing students and families in San Francisco’s Visitation Valley access to education, mentoring and tutoring resources, as well as high-speed AT&T Fiber internet, Wi-Fi, and computers.

The Illinois Electric Cooperative (IEC) said it will use funding received through the Connect America Fund II (CAF II) auction to deploy fixed wireless in rural Pike County (IL). IEC will use technology from Ericsson and Xtreme LTE for the deployment, which will use the CBRS spectrum. The companies did not indicate whether the spectrum to be used is in the licensed or unlicensed portion of the band. Fixed wireless technology has made big gains in recent years, and both LTE and CBRS spectrum were key developments to boost speeds and performance. Because LTE has been widely used by mobile providers, it offers economies of scale that didn’t exist with earlier generation fixed wireless. And the CBRS band includes a broad swath of mid-band spectrum, which is seen as providing the optimum mixture of speeds and coverage. The CAF II auction awarded funding to cover some of the costs of deploying broadband to unserved areas, with funding going to the company that committed to deploying service in an area for the lowest level of support. A weighting system favored bids to provide higher-speed, lower latency service. IEC’s win was in the “above baseline” category, which requires the company to deploy service at speeds of at least 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream.