Virginia

Verizon is hiring 1,800 additional technicians to support its East Coast broadband expansion efforts in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Washington (DC). Many of the targeted markets are rural and traditionally underserved communities, and so they qualify for funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.

One year has passed since Brightspeed became the fifth largest incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) in the US, and it’s made some notable progress in its $2 billion multi-year fiber deployment. Most of Brightspeed’s footprint is currently served with copper, but the operator is undertaking fiber builds in 17 states and officially launched fiber service on March 1, 2023.

Virginia Tech bested the Federal Communications Commission in mapping the commonwealth’s broadband needs. The prize: an additional $250 million in federal money to help fill those high-speed internet voids. The Virginia Tech’s Center for Geospatial Information Technology calculated that the FCC had undercounted by 180,000 underserved locations and challenged the numbers. The FCC conceded about 80,000 locations that are now eligible for support from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act’s (IIJA) Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) commited nearly $50 million to four organizations to expand middle-mile high-speed Internet infrastructure in the following states:

The Federal Communications Commission committed nearly $7 million in a new funding round through the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF) Program, which provides digital tools and services to support students in communities across the country. The funding commitment supports applications from the third application window, benefitting approximately 50,000 students nationwide, including students in California, Colorado, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) has released the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Initial Proposal Volume 2 for a public comment window.