Data & Mapping

In 2021, the South Carolina General Assembly established the Office of Broadband Coordinator within the Office of Regulatory Staff to serve as the central broadband planning body for the state and to coordinate with federal, state, regional, local, and private entities to encourage the continued development of access to broadband in the Palmetto State. The office was charged with convening a collaborative stakeholder process to identify challenges to expediting broadband access—and so it established the Broadband Advisory Council to help guide broadband planning in South Carolina.

New legislation introduced in the Texas House of Representatives could give voters in the state a chance to decide whether or not to throw $5 billion behind efforts to improve broadband there. The bill, known as H.B. 9, calls for the creation of a state Broadband Infrastructure Fund and would give the Texas comptroller and Public Utility Commission power to allocate the money for specific uses.

Several people have asked me recently if cellular companies will be pursuing Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants. Until recently, cellular companies didn’t have a product that would have qualified for broadband grants. BEAD and other grants are awarded to internet service providers (ISP) that serve homes and businesses, not cell phones.

SpaceX has offered a public explanation for why Starlink's actual service availability falls far short of what it claimed on the Federal Communications Commission's national broadband map. SpaceX's FCC filings indicate it offers fixed broadband at virtually every address in the US even though the Starlink website's service map shows it has a waitlist in huge portions of the country.  SpaceX removed some homes from the FCC database when residents filed challenges because they were unable to order Starlink at addresses listed as served on the FCC map. SpaceX tried to clear up the confusion in

Consolidated Communications will provide access to high-speed Internet for thousands of people in New Hampshire as soon as 2024 after the New Hampshire Executive Council approved giving it $40 million in federal funding. The panel unanimously authorized using American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money for a three-year contract to make fiber-optic broadband available to nearly 25,000 homes, including almost 3,100 in Cheshire County. Consolidated has also pledged to add another 32,000 homes in the project area using its own money, but it didn’t have a county-by-county breakdown for these additiona

In a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) expressed concerns about the Federal Communications Commission's new National Broadband Map and urged the NTIA to provide states with flexibility in determining locations and areas eligible for funding in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program.

In August 2022,  we launched the first version of our Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) dashboard. The goal was to take the confusing and inaccessible federal data on program penetration, signups, and use, and create a tool useful for local governments, policymakers, and broadband advocates working to bring the benefit to as many households as possible. Now, we're back with a 2.0 version of the dashboard.

SpaceX submitted its Broadband Data Collection filing, which includes subscription and availability data related to Starlink services as of December 31, 2022. In connection with this filing, the Federal Communications Commission requires all internet service providers to submit supporting information regarding the methodology underlying its availability data.

The Federal Communications Commission's update of the National Broadband Map has received considerable criticism.

House Commerce Committee Chair Cathy Rodgers (R-WA) and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Morgan Griffith (R-VA), along with the chairs of the subcommittee of jurisdiction, wrote letters to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Energy (DOE), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), requesting a full accounting of how they’ve spent taxpayer dollars. The Chairs specifically requested funding information from: the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Ac