Individuals who primarily Reside in a Rural Area

Governor Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) released her executive budget priorities with a focus on lowering costs, investing in public education, securing the state’s water future, tackling the affordable housing crisis, and more. Gov Hobbs would put $5 million to support the development of fast and reliable broadband service in schools, $50 million one-time deposit into the newly established Rural Broadband Accelerated Match Fund, and $16 million in one-time funding to enhance broadband infrastructure at State facilities in rural Arizona. 

The Federal Communications Commission released a file that contains the number of “units” (usually housing units) in the  Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric (Fabric). There are 158 million “units” in the Fabric and 140 million housing units in the 2020 Census. In the least dense 2,143 counties, there are 30 million “units” in the Fabric and 24.5 million Census housing units. As counties get more rural, the Fabric increasingly has more locations than the Census. In the least dense counties, the Fabric routinely has 40% more locations than the Census.

Governor Laura Kelly (D-KS) announced that $44.5 million will be awarded to nine service providers to extend high-speed internet to 18,468 locations in 15 underserved counties across the state. This is the third and final award phase of the Kansas Capital Project Funds (CPF) Broadband Infrastructure Program. The CPF program provides funding to make broadband connections in critical areas of the state that lack access to high-speed internet.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) announced the conclusion of the Connect America Fund Phase II auction long-form application review. There were 195 authorized applicant state combinations, totaling $1.48 billion authorized in 10-year support, covering 708,494 locations in 45 states. Authorized bids included a range of performance tiers, with more than one-half of the winning bids at 100/20 Mbps or higher.

Congress already allocated $65 billion for broadband in 2021 via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), but as negotiations over the 2023 Farm Bill get underway some are angling for even more cash to boost rural broadband. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Farm Bill is a sprawling piece of legislation covering agricultural and food programs that are revisited every five years or so. The last Farm Bill was passed in late 2018, meaning it is up for renewal in the back half of 2023.

Time is running out for wireless internet service providers (WISPs) to change the government’s mind about unlicensed spectrum. With pressure mounting, Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) CEO David Zumwalt sent a fresh letter to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) warning its current rules could lead to $8.6 billion in broadband subsidy money being spent on areas that are already covered by fixed wireless access services using unlicensed airwaves.

As recently as fifteen years ago, I was often asked by many of my clients to help them benchmark their internet service provider (ISP) against their peers. By this, they wanted to know if they had the right number of employees for their customer base, if their revenues and expenses were in line with other similar ISPs, if they had too much expense from overheads, etc. It turns out that ISPs were not particularly comparable. They seemed to differ in most of the statistics that my clients wanted to understand.

Improvements in our state broadband mapping data and related resources has revealed that we have more households and businesses without access to broadband than understood in 2021 (>198,000 with no service or insufficient service @ 25/3 and >291,000 @ 100/20). As the new Federal Communications Commission "fabric map" updates coverage through a challenge process, it is expected this number will reveal further deficits in coverage.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB), in conjunction with the Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA), authorized Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (Auction 904) support for 1,764 winning bids identified. Almost all the winning bids were made by Resound Networks. Resound Networks won bids for the following states: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas. Hughes Networks won two bids for the state of Rhode Island.

Despite increased investment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of households in the rural United States still lack adequate access to high-speed internet. In this study, we evaluate a wireless broadband network deployed in Turney, a small, underserved rural community in northwest Missouri. In addition to collecting survey data before and after this internet intervention, we collected pre-treatment and post-treatment survey data from comparison communities to serve as a control group.