Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

How much broadband will Americans get for the $75 billion that Congress committed in 2021? That’s enough money to equip an additional 17 million households with broadband, taking the US to 99 percent broadband coverage, according to a Federal Communications Commission staff paper and data from the Census Bureau.

A federal effort to map out and better understand who in America has decent internet and who does not is already getting challenged by those in the know, including the Colorado Broadband Office, which has submitted 13,000 challenges of the data. The map is just two weeks old. And the state isn’t done challenging the data collected by the Federal Communications Commission, said Brandy Reitter, executive director of the state’s broadband office. “Thirteen thousand is a lot but likely doesn’t include all missing locations,” Reitter said.

The 117th Congress is nearing its end. There are still several broadband policy issues and related matters for Congress to sort out. Meanwhile, the current Congress has few working days left in 2022—and still needs to pass a budget for 2023—and it's unclear how much legislation will reach President Biden's desk when Republicans gain the House majority in January. Here are two policy matters to watch for the remaining days of this Congress:

The Federal Communications Commission voted recently to implement consumer broadband labels. The pricing information alone must be giving shivers to the marketing folks at the biggest broadband providers. The requirement that I think will be the most controversial is the requirement to disclose the typical broadband speed and latency. Some providers will have a real dilemma with the speed disclosure. Some of the dilemmas include the following:

I added US territories as recipients of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) allocation dollars based on their number of unserved locations in addition to the minimum fixed allocation (see). The upshot is Puerto Rico has 212,70 unserved locations, 18% of its total, and an estimated $874 million allocation, which is significant. The other territories don’t change the numbers materially because we don’t see them as having unserved locations.

It has been just over a year since the Digital Equity Act (DEA) was signed into law as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and the $2.75 billion it provides is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to design systems that will enable true digital equity. Congress and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration outlined specifics for states to include in their digital equity plans.

With $37 billion of the $42 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program based on the number of locations unserved by broadband, accurately measuring who is unserved is critical — both for the allocation of funds, but, more importantly, so people without access to real broadband can be connected.

US Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) and Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) led their Senate colleagues in a bipartisan letter to the Secretaries of the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce about the need to expand high-speed internet access in rural communities. Internet providers are required to obtain permits from the federal government when installing telecommunications infrastructure on federal lands or for projects using federal funding. Right now, they face extensive delays in the permitting process.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that Hawaii received its first “Internet for All” grants for deploying high-speed Internet networks and developing digital skills training programs under the Biden-Harris Administration’s Internet for All initiative.

Just days after the Federal Communications Commission released an initial draft of a national map showing the availability of broadband internet, some groups are criticizing what they see as the map’s shortcomings. A letter from Public Knowledge dated Nov.