Building new broadband infrastructure is a big investment for any municipality. While the cost of that investment shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s equally important to consider the significant cost savings that can be reaped with publicly owned infrastructure. Many cities have slashed the cost of connecting their schools to broadband by opting to build their own infrastructure, instead of continuing to pay a private provider for connections. Portland (OR), for example, had been paying an incumbent provider $1,310 per month for  10 Mbps connections to schools. When the schools were connected to the city-owned network instead, the cost dropped to just $616 per month for a 400 Mbps connection. Not only did the change drastically cut costs for the school district, but the speed of service was improved fortyfold. The icing on the cake is that broadband is relatively affordable infrastructure. With the same money it would take to build a quarter mile of a light rail line, a city could build about 87 miles of an underground fiber network. Investment in publicly owned broadband infrastructure not only produces dramatic cost savings for municipalities, but fosters higher quality of life and stronger communities.

[Cat Blake is the Senior Program Manager for Next Century Cities, an organization that supports more than 200 member communities committed to expanding broadband access for residents.]

In 221 large and medium-size US cities, according to the latest data from the US Census, at least 30% of all households still lacked a wireline broadband connection in 2018. They are NDIA’s Worst Connected Cities of 2018. The 2018 American Community Survey One Year Estimates (ACS), released by the US Census in September 2019, include 2018 household Internet access data for 623 US cities and “Census designated places” with populations of 65,000 or more. NDIA has ranked all 623 of these communities by:

• the percentage of households without “wireline” broadband subscriptions (“Broadband such as cable, fiber optic or DSL”), as well as
• the percentage of each community’s households that lacked broadband Internet subscriptions of any type, including mobile data plans.

Diane Rinaldo, acting head of the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, says that thanks to government policies that emphasize collaboration with industry, the US, as promised, winning the race to 5G. 

President Donald Trump has made winning a chief goal, including beating the Chinese in the race to 5G supremacy. In a speech to the Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles, she pointed out that NTIA had pledged that victory at last year's conference and made the case for why the Trump Administration was delivering on that pledge. She said that included a long-term spectrum policy, removing obstacles to infrastructure buildouts by streamlining permitting and identifying security gaps. The first two have been the province of the FCC, which has been freeing up spectrum, high and low as it were, for 5G, as well as loosening regs on cell tower environmental and historical reviews and putting other local reviews on the clock. She said that there were 5G networks in 35 cities, with that number expected to be pushing 100 by year's end. 

2019 has been the Year of 5G. And most Americans know something about 5G by now. But we need to do a better job of explaining 5G in plain terms. It’s important that we meet this communications challenge. We have to shift our audience from those who are immersed in tech and telecom to ordinary people who aren’t interested in the latest 3GPP release but who are very interested in how new tools can make their jobs more rewarding, their kids’ schools more enriching, and their families closer. Part of the challenge is that people tend to underestimate the pace and nature of technological change. We suffer from a status quo bias. We tend to think that the next big thing will just be a faster version of what we have today. We can lack the vision to see the disruptive and transformational shift that an upgrade in technology will enable—the innovative new businesses it will support. Or, more importantly to everyday Americans, the pain points in our daily lives that will be eliminated.

An internal memo on cybersecurity warns that "the White House is posturing itself to be electronically compromised once again." That's after at least a dozen top- or high-level officials have resigned or been pushed out of a cybersecurity mission that was established under former-President Barack Obama to protect the White House from Russian hacking and other threats. Warnings by officials from the former Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (OCISO) — which in July was folded into the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) — suggest new intelligence vulnerabilities. The memo doubled as a formal resignation letter by its author, Dimitrios Vastakis, who was the branch chief of the White House computer network defense.