Infrastructure

Roughly 3 million students across the United States don't have access to a home internet connection. A third of households with school-age children that do not have home internet cite the expense as the main reason, according to federal Education Department statistics. But in some rural places, a reliable connection can't be had at any price. The void is especially acute in eastern Kentucky. Many districts have been scrambling  to set up paper-based alternatives to online instruction or create WiFi hot spots in school parking lots and other public areas.

An estimated 324,000 rural Marylanders don’t have access to high-speed internet, according to a 2019 report from a state task force.

More than two dozen Members of the House wrote to Congressional leaders requesting that CARES Act funding be eligible for permanent broadband infrastructure construction -- and that Congress provides additional time for the buildout of new infrastructure. 

The State Finance Council approved $60 million in grants to better beef up the state’s broadband infrastructure, although lawmakers acknowledge it won’t fully address the scope of the problem in rural Kansas. The money will come from the state’s allotment of federal CARES Act funding and will be funneled out in two separate grant programs. One, a $50 million pot, will aim to bolster internet speeds in underserved areas, while the remaining $10 million is designed to specifically help low-income residents.

It’s been just over a year since the Federal Communications Commission dropped the educational use requirement for the Educational Broadband Service (EBS) spectrum, saying most licensees weren’t deploying the spectrum for its intended use. Now, with thousands of students facing the possibility of another semester outside the classroom, schools that hold spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band are reconsidering its value.

CenturyLink CEO and President Jeff Storey said on the company's Q2 earnings call that he doesn't think things will return to pre-COVID 19 days, but there are now new opportunities. Storey said about 75% of CenturyLink's employees are currently working from home. He told CenturyLink's employees not to expect to return to their offices before early fall. CenturyLink will take a phased approach to employees returning to their office spaces. "Frankly, I don't expect we will ever return to the work from work approach we had prior to the pandemic," Storey said.

Across the rural US, more than 100 cooperatives, first launched to provide electric and telephone services as far back as the 1930s, are now laying miles of fiber optic cable to connect their members to high-speed internet. Many started building their own networks after failing to convince established internet service providers to cover their communities. But while rural fiber optic networks have spread swiftly over the past five years, their progress has been uneven.

University of Virginia Professor Christopher Ali spoke about rural broadband with the Reimagine New York Commission. The rural-urban digital divide is primarily one of infrastructure. At least 22.3% of rural Americans, or 15.8 million people, lack access to broadband infrastructure and are therefore cut off from the internet.

The House passed, on a 217 to 197 vote, a package of fiscal year 2021 appropriations bills. The package consists of six bills that fund federal departments including Defense, Commerce, Justice, Energy, Treasury Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development from October 1, 2020 to September 30, 2021. The $1.3 trillion package, H.R.

Connect Americans Now (CAN) sent a letter to Congressional leaders, co-signed by 46 organizations, calling on lawmakers to provide funding to eliminate the digital divide for all Americans as part of the next COVID-19 relief package.