Infrastructure

 House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA) said that a lot of broadband internet access service providers, "for whatever reason," claim they have service where they don't, something he said everyone knows "has been going on for years." He said that since Democrats and Republicans agree that broadband maps aren't good, the Federal Communications Commission would just be throwing $20 million out the window by starting to give out most of the Rural Development Opportunities Fund (RDOF) subsidy money.

How public funds, or State Aid, have been used to support the deployment of broadband infrastructure in Europe since 2003. The descriptive analysis relies on a unique data set on all the broadband measures notified to the European Commission by Member States between 2003 and 2018. The authors identify two waves of State Aid for broadband: one for the deployment of basic broadband, and a more recent one for the roll out of next-generation access networks. The use of State Aid is very heterogeneous across Member States, with a few large countries representing the bulk of the cases.

The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) Office of Broadband announced the first recipients of the Illinois Connected Communities grant program, created to assist some of the most underserved areas of the state with building broadband capacity.  Through cross-sector collaboration, this new program directs $150,000 in state-funded small grants for 12 community and local government partners to lead the development of strategic plans to ensure access, adoption, and utilization of high-speed broadband in their communities.

The broadband market has finally been anointed as the ultimate “centerpiece” of everything people do. The first bill paid each month is not to a mortgage company, a religious institution or a credit card. It is to the broadband provider. Independent service providers that target the multifamily industry are going to see their target markets shift views in several ways once this is over. Specifically, I believe there will be a surge of new bulk internet agreements added to hundreds of communities. I believe these plans will include much higher speeds – 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps or even higher.

We’ve been working to fill [the tricky gap between urban and rural broadband access] for more than two decades. Around 95 percent of the US population today has access to broadband of at least 25 megabits per second. 99 percent of non-rural households do, and 98 percent of non-rural households enjoy access to 100 megabits-per-second service.

49 organizations spanning multiple industries announced they have joined forces as part of a new coalition dedicated to helping close America’s digital divide.

Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Mike Braun (R-IN), Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Doug Jones (D-AL) introduced the Rural Broadband Acceleration Act, bipartisan legislation that will bolster efforts to expand access to rural broadband nationwide and speed up the distribution of the Federal Communication Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The RDOF will allocate $20.4 billion to building rural broadband in two phases and this legislation will ensure that some of that money is distributed to communities much faster than the original deadline.

Access to the internet is a basic human right, the United Nations declared in 2016. But, as the Covid-19 crisis has highlighted, it is a right that is still denied to billions of people at a time when connectivity has never been more important. For professional classes in rich countries with good internet access and the ability to work from home, the crisis has been made infinitely easier thanks to Zoom video calls and Amazon deliveries. It has been a far more precarious existence for those who have manual jobs and children at home with no internet access.

The COVID-19 outbreak has magnified troubles many rural areas face without high-speed broadband. With more than $6.6 million in federal CARES Act relief funds allocated to Somerset County, officials said they plan to use half of the total toward their broadband initiative, which has been a top goal for years. President Commissioner Gerald Walker said extending high-speed coverage to 85% of the county is expected to cost more than $8 million. Board members said their $3.5 million would go a long way toward that.

The House on Wednesday passed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill, the Moving Forward Act, that would sharply increase spending on roads and transit, push for deep reductions in pollution, direct billions to water projects, affordable housing, broadband and schools, and upgrade hospitals and US Postal Service trucks. The bill pours more than $300 billion into repairing bridges and roads, $130 billion into schools that educate low-income children, more than $100 billion into building or preserving affordable housing and $100 billion into expanding broadband internet access.