After a highly competitive process, Pioneer Connect of Philomath (OR) has been awarded $24,952,007 from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the 3rd round of funding for the ReConnect program. This ReConnect 3 grant will bring Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) to 1,528 locations in Benton, Lincoln, and Polk counties. The cooperative will install 296 miles of fiber to provide increased speeds and enhanced reliability, eliminating many challenges faced by members of these communities. This grant will be combined with an $8,317,336 loan bringing the total project to $33,269,343. Pioneer will have five years to complete this project once the final documentation is completed and funds are made available. Pioneer Connect’s long-term strategic plan is to replace its copper network with FTTH across its 1,300 square-mile serving area. Being awarded grants like Reconnect 3 helps expedite the delivery of fiber to rural communities. Pioneer’s current FTTH in Philomath will bring symmetrical speeds up to 1 GIG to more than 3,000 homes and businesses. Pioneer Connect is finalizing plans to go out to bid with their next FTTH project in Waldport, Oregon, which includes more than 1,300 locations. This marks the third grant the cooperative has received for its FTTH projects.

Of the numerous challenges that confront broadband expansion in rural areas, long driveways stand as an additional challenge. However, Charles County in Maryland is leading the charge to tackle the issue head-on. The county’s work started several years ago when it established a Rural Broadband Taskforce aimed at closing the connectivity gap there. In 2019, the task force hired a consultant to help it develop a Broadband Strategic Plan, which was subsequently approved in early 2020. That plan identified the unserved residents in the county and grouped them into one of three categories: those in contiguous unserved areas (Category 1), those in unserved pockets (Category 2), and locations set so far back from the road that service providers are unwilling to reach them unless the homeowners share the cost (Category 3). Evelyn Jacobson, the county’s Chief Information Officer, said homes with long driveways account for about 30% of the approximately 4,800 unserved homes in Charles County. As noted in the Broadband Strategic Plan, however, these “homes are not considered ‘unserved’ under federal and state definitions,” a status which can be immensely frustrating for residents. Jacobson said the county has spent the past couple of years leveraging American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to address locations in Categories 1 and 2. Now, using the aforementioned ARPA funding, Charles County is offering grants of up to $15,000 to help Category 3 residents get service.

If you’re frustrated with the speed of your home Internet, what can you do to improve it? Before making the leap to a new provider or absorbing the often difficult-to-swallow costs of a high-speed service plan, you might want to consider another culprit of slow Internet: your WiFi connection. WiFi connection performance is determined by factors independent of your access connection, while the access connection performance is (primarily) determined by the specific service contract you purchase from a service provider (ISP). WiFi bottlenecks occur when the speed of your WiFi connection (the WiFi speed) is worse than the speed of the access connection (the access speed). We explore how often WiFi bottlenecks occur and the relative difference between WiFi speeds and access speeds using data collected from households in Chicago.

• WiFi bottlenecks occur across most households in our data. Households that subscribe to Internet plans with high access speeds (200 Mbps or greater) experience significantly more WiFi bottlenecks than households that subscribe to plans with low access speeds (less than 200 Mbps). In some cases, due to the presence of bottlenecks, the actual speeds at which households use the Internet are much lower than the Internet speed that they are buying from an ISP.
• Consumers looking to improve their home Internet performance should check to see if their WiFi setup supports the speed tier that they buy from an ISP. If your WiFi speed is consistently lower than your access speed, consider upgrading your WiFi router, moving it to a new location in your house, purchasing WiFi extenders, and other solutions to improve your WiFi performance. When purchasing new Internet service or upgrading your current service, consider whether your WiFi setup can support the offered access speeds.
• Infrastructure investments improve the access speeds for a community, but whether these investments will improve the community’s lived online experience depends on complementary policies to improve WiFi networks. For example, a policy that aims to build a high-speed fiber network in a city should also include investments to supply residents with WiFi equipment that supports the access speeds that a fiber network enables.