In mid-September, BroadbandUSA’s State Broadband Leaders Network (SBLN) held its semiannual Summit to discuss broadband issues and policy at the state level. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provided an update on its National Broadband Availability Map (NBAM) and introduced BroadbandUSA’s new State Broadband Mapping Cohort. The NBAM is a geographic information system (GIS) platform for the visualization and comparison of federal, state, and commercially available broadband data sets to better inform broadband projects and funding decisions. NBAM’s partners include 22 states as well as the Department of Agriculture, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the US Economic Development Administration. During the presentation, NTIA showcased the wide variety of available datasets and highlighted how NBAM users can harness this data. For example, comparing Ookla crowdsourced speed test data with the Federal Communications Commission's Form 477 Broadband Deployment Data allows users to highlight potential gaps in broadband availability. To further ensure that the views of the states are incorporated as NTIA’s broadband mapping platform evolves, the SBLN and NBAM teams introduced BroadbandUSA’s State Broadband Mapping Cohort.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that funding through Stage 2 of the Uniendo a Puerto Rico Fund will result in all locations in Puerto Rico having access to fixed broadband service with speeds of at least 100 Mbps. And nearly one-third of those locations will have access to fixed broadband service with speeds of at least 1 Gbps. Two winning applicants in the Uniendo a Puerto Rico Stage 2 Competitive Process submitted bids for $127.1 million in funding over 10 years covering more than 1.2 million locations through a competitive process that awarded support for fixed voice and broadband services based on the weighting of price and network performance, including speed, latency, usage allowance, and resiliency. Liberty Communications has committed to offering service to over 914,000 locations, and Puerto Rico Telephone Company will offer service to over 308,000 locations.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) announced $12.7 million to increase broadband internet access across Michigan. The broadband projects were selected through the Connecting Michigan Communities (CMIC) grant program. The awards are estimated to generate between $15.7 and $23.1 million in annual economic benefits to consumers. These projects will extend access to over 10,900 households, businesses, and community anchor institutions (CAI) in Michigan. All projects have committed to closing the internet access divide and provide digital literacy training materials to residents and businesses in their proposed service area, and work with local CAIs and foundations to host events to promote e-learning, job, and workforce training. Recommendations for the second round of CMIC grant awards will be announced later, providing another $5.3 million towards further infrastructure expansion across the state. Gov. Whitmer signed a budget that included an additional $14.3 million in grant funding for a third round of projects in 2021. This announcement builds on the launch of the Connecting Michigan Taskforce (CMIT), with Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist II helping to lead the efforts to strengthen and grow broadband infrastructure across Michigan. Approximately 1,243,339 Michigan households do not have a permanent fixed broadband connection at home.

(10/8/2020)

The South Carolina General Assembly passed a bill supporters said will help get high-speed internet to hundreds of thousands of people in rural areas. The gap between cities and richer areas with good internet access and poorer, less populated areas without broadband access became even more stark over the past six months as COVID-19 pushed schools into the virtual world and made online meetings the way businesses and governments often communicate. The bill allows and gives incentives to smaller power companies and cooperatives to let internet providers provide their service alongside electric lines. Some 650,000 of the 5 million people in South Carolina don’t have access to broadband internet.

(9/24/2020)

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS), the nation’s spectrum and communications lab, released a new official code base for the Irregular Terrain Model (ITM) for use by experts and non-experts alike. ITM is the fifth propagation model code base that ITS has released on GitHub. In addition to the C++ propagation model source code, ITS published packages that target the .NET development environment. ITS also code signs its propagation software. Users can be confident that our products originate with us, and have not been tampered with. Behind every wireless telecommunications decision is a prediction of how far the signal will travel and how much strength it will lose along the way. This is called propagation modelling. Propagation models drive decisions about things like how and where to deploy cell towers, what rules to establish for geographically sharing spectrum, and what kind of spectrum equipment to build. It is vital that all stakeholders trust the models being used and accept the results as sound.

(10/16/2020)