State

The Department of the Treasury approved $115.5 million for high-speed internet projects in Hawaii under the American Rescue Plan’s Capital Projects Fund. The state will invest $101.7 million of the award in the Hawaii Subsea Middle Mile Program designed to address the unique subsea cable infrastructure that’s needed to provide connectivity between the islands to ensure they have reliable, high-speed internet access.

Focus Broadband has completed the final stages of a project in Brunswick County (NC). Residents and businesses in the communities of Northwest and Sandy Creek now can access gigabit speed service. Focus Broadband was awarded $1.4 million to provide high-speed Internet to more than 1,000 addresses in Brunswick County in North Carolina’s special supplementary round of the Growing Rural Economies through Access to Technology (GREAT) program.

Fourteen Maine counties and 73 communities will benefit from $20 million in grant funding from the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) as part of its Reach Me Line Extension Program that will expand reliable, fast and affordable internet.

How do big broadband providers get away with charging the same prices in urban areas for both slow and fast broadband? An Associated Press article found that one customer was paying the same price for 1 Mbps DSL from AT&T as other city residents were paying for a fiber connection. It would be easy to justify charging the same price for both technologies if AT&T was in the process of converting everybody in New Orleans to fiber, but this is not the case.

In a mad scramble to verify a map that will be used to determine Colorado’s share of federal broadband funding, state officials trying to meet a Jan. 13, 2023 deadline made nearly 15,000 challenges in three weeks. The majority were accepted. Of those, about 13,000 were submitted for incorrect addresses, the wrong number of units in a building, and other inaccurate information. So far, 6,700 location challenges were accepted.

What challenges exist at the federal, state, and local levels that delay or burden broadband deployment?  How can Congress help expedite or streamline the process for broadband deployment? Is attaching telecommunications equipment on municipally or cooperatively-owned poles more difficult or expensive than on other poles?

The Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) is asking the public for input on internet accessibility, affordability and usage. BDO will use the Digital Opportunity Plan: Public Survey to develop a Texas Digital Opportunity Plan, which is required to draw down federal funding for connecting Texans to reliable, high-speed internet. The survey is open for approximately two months. BDO expects to complete the plan this fall.

There are a variety of landline or wireless technologies that can deliver broadband. In most instances, wireless solutions have an advantage with respect to mobility and transferability (the ability to move broadband investment from one subscriber location to another). However, this advantage often disappears (and sometimes flips) when considering the increased operational expenses of wireless and the ongoing capital investment required.

The Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) announced a 

We sent a memo to state broadband offices that are participating in our broadband education and training initiative, detailing the diverse strategies that California, Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina have employed to direct grant funding to priority areas—communities that have a substantial unmet need for investment in broadband infrastructure. Several state broadband programs have utilized mechanisms to designate specific communities as “priority areas” within the project areas eligible for grants, allowing them to target or further incentivize grant funding to those communities.