Caught in the crossfire of continued budget negotiations between North Carolina’s General Assembly and Gov Roy Cooper (D-NC) is the expansion of a program funding last-mile broadband infrastructure in the state. Cooper vetoed the budget passed by the Legislature in June. The grant program is one of many facets in the Broadband Infrastructure Office’s (BIO) mission to facilitate high-speed Internet access statewide by June 2021.
We are at an impasse. Legislative and corporate policies are designed to solve a specific problem for a particular stakeholder at a set time and place. In contrast, the online hate ecosystem is volatile, unpredictable, constantly changing, and deliberately confusing.
Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy was not surprised by -- but is not enthusiastic -- about some aspects of the proposed Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which would essentially replace the Connect America broadband funding program for the nation’s larger price cap carriers. His concerns relate to the proposed reverse auction, which would be used to award program funding. In the Connect America Fund program, price cap carriers had a right of first refusal on Connect America Fund (CAF) support for their local service territories.
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Following his July 23 announcement establishing the Arkansas State Broadband Office, Gov Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) announced “Arkansas Rural Connect,” a new $25 million grant program within the Arkansas State Broadband Office. The goal is to provide high-speed broadband to rural communities throughout Arkansas by 2022, as outlined in the State Broadband Plan released in May. The Arkansas Rural Connect (ARC) program will provide grants to qualifying communities of at least 500 people to deploy high-speed broadband to its residents.
Large tech companies including Apple and Facebook contend the airwaves in the 6 gigahertz range should be open for use by the next generation of lightning-fast wireless networks. Utilities say the new networks threaten to create interference that could make it harder to keep the lights on. "Opening the 6 GHz band to unlicensed users could cause interference with our signals and could jeopardize the reliability of our communications network,' said Mike Twomey, a senior vice president for federal policy and government affairs for Entergy in New Orleans.
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