In May 2021, the Florida Legislature passed the Florida Broadband Deployment Act of 2021, codifying the Florida Office of Broadband, which had been created in the previous year within the state's Department of Economic Opportunity. The law provided the office access to federal grant dollars and allocated $1.5 million for the office to develop geographic information system (GIS) maps of Florida’s broadband availability. On June 30, 2022, Florida's Department of Economic Opportunity submitted the Florida Strategic Plan for Broadband to Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and the state legislature detailing the goals and strategies to improve and expand broadband Internet connectivity in the state. The plan focuses on increasing broadband availability, adoption, and use to yield a more robust workforce, enhanced educational opportunities, and healthier Floridians. The plan also promotes economic growth, workforce education and job training, and workforce housing, particularly in rural, unserved, and underserved areas of the state.

How much broadband will Americans get for the $75 billion that Congress committed in 2021? That’s enough money to equip an additional 17 million households with broadband, taking the US to 99 percent broadband coverage, according to a Federal Communications Commission staff paper and data from the Census Bureau. Whether taxpayers get that much broadband for their $75 billion will depend on government officials avoiding past mistakes. Congress provided the $75 billion through two pieces of legislation: the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). These bills added funds to some existing broadband programs and created new ones. The programs are overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the FCC, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS), and the Internal Revenue Service. About 75 percent of the $75 billion is for expanding broadband. The remainder is for affordability and equity programs and administration. NTIA is responsible for about 70 percent of the money. The authors of the ARPA and IIJA followed well-worn paths in choosing their programs. Unfortunately, these were paths to programs that failed to produce. Given that the ARPA and IIJA set government officials on paths that went nowhere in the past, what can be done to ensure that the $75 billion of taxpayer money isn’t wasted? 

I added US territories as recipients of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) allocation dollars based on their number of unserved locations in addition to the minimum fixed allocation (see). The upshot is Puerto Rico has 212,70 unserved locations, 18% of its total, and an estimated $874 million allocation, which is significant. The other territories don’t change the numbers materially because we don’t see them as having unserved locations. This could be due to incomplete data. Because the Federal Communications Commission didn’t release a file of all locations, we can only infer the number of unserved locations by state. While I don’t think this is an issue for the official US states, it may be for territories. Since Puerto Rico is much bigger than the other territories, and its data appears to be complete, I believe this allocation formula now captures the bulk of the effect of adding territories.

One pandemic-era program demonstrated that Chicago can solve big inequities with a spirit of partnership and the right resources. Since launching in June 2020, Chicago Connected, the country’s most comprehensive internet connectivity program for students,  has served nearly one in three CPS students — more than 100,000 students in 60,000 households. In a new report, Kids First Chicago (K1C) found the connectivity gap for school-age children was halved during the first six months of Chicago Connected — from approximately 110,000 disconnected children in 2018 to roughly 55,000 by the end of 2020. Moreover, adults in the program logged nearly 30,000 learning hours using free digital learning resources, and many families received free refurbished computers. Still, over 200,000 Chicago households still do not have high-speed internet. And over 260,000 households, nearly one in four, do not own a laptop or desktop computer. The model of partnership established by Chicago Connected provides a path for the city to eradicate the digital divide and unleash the potential of all residents to thrive.

• First, internet connectivity gaps can be tackled through community-led efforts to sign up families in the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), as well as by expanding internet offerings.
• Second, the lack of devices can be addressed through a public-private partnership to recycle and distribute computers to households in need.
• Finally, the lack of digital skills can be overcome with better marketing of learning resources and stronger alignment between content providers, employers and higher education. 

[Hal Woods is chief of policy and José Daniel Pacas, Ph.D., is chief of data science and research for the nonprofit Kids First Chicago.]

Cox Communications has filed a formal protest over Escambia County’s (FL) decision to select the Escambia River Electric Cooperative for a rural broadband project. In a letter sent to the county's purchasing manager, attorneys for Cox argued the county deviated from its selection process outlined in its request for proposal (RFP) for the construction of a fiber optic internet network in unserved areas of the county, and the decision to select EREC violated the county's purchasing policies. Cox also argued the county was supposed to notify all interested parties of any substantial or procedural changes to the selection process. Escambia County voted during a special meeting to select EREC for a $6 million award under the proposal and change its project area to match EREC's service area. EREC is the primary electric utility for most of the northern half of Escambia County. Escambia County has set aside $22 million from its federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for broadband infrastructure, with $10 million for the northern half of the county and $12 million for the southern half.

The Federal Communications Commission's recent restrictions on five Chinese telecoms’ technologies — adopted on Nov. 25, 2022 — could impact state and local governments in ways previous bans haven’t. “Up until now … the federal agencies have been prohibited from buying this kind of technology, but it's still been widely available to state and local governments, to private companies, individuals,” said Jack Corrigan, research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). State and local governments may not always be aware they’re using the technologies, because the tools may reach them as white-label products via third-party providers. The new ban takes aim at that issue by targeting the technologies themselves, regardless of what name they’re sold under and who’s selling them. The rule would not require state and local governments to give up the tools they’re already using or stop them from buying tech from the banned companies that are already in the country. But it would gradually dwindle the available supply, by blocking new sales and imports of these companies’ offerings. 

Lawmakers ended what had been an effort to allow media organizations to band together to negotiate revenue sharing deals with tech giants, leaving the provisions out of a massive spending bill amid intense pushback from industry and advocacy groups. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) was omitted from a bicameral agreement on Congress’s sprawling defense-spending legislation. Apparently, the JCPA provisions had been considered for potential inclusion. The move came a day after Facebook said it would “consider removing news from our platform” if lawmakers moved ahead with the measure, a threat that publisher groups denounced.

AT&T is looking to expand fiber beyond its traditional local exchange carrier service territory, said AT&T Chief Operating Officer Jeff McElfresh. AT&T already did an out-of-region fiber deployment in Mesa (AZ) and apparently is sufficiently satisfied with the results so far to consider doing more of the same. McElfresh noted that AT&T operates in two different realms – as a “nationwide wireless company that has a point of presence everywhere [and] distribution everywhere” and as a “fixed wireline based local exchange carrier, telco.” He sees the company’s nationwide wireless presence as an asset for a potential out-of-region expansion. “We’ve got a really good wireless market presence, so our brand is known, and we’ve got scale as the largest builder of fiber in this country,” he said. That fiber service is future proof, he said, and the company has the opportunity to provide an end-to-end fiber connection from the internet to the customer.