Thursday, January 9, 2025
Headlines Daily Digest
Today | State Leadership: Making the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program Work
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When Fiber is Too Expensive for BEAD, NTIA OKs Plans for Wireless, LEO
Connecting Georgians with Digital Equity Capacity Funds
Technology in Service of Human Progress: NTIA in the Biden-Harris Administration
Broadband Funding
State/Local Initiatives
Emergency Communications
Content
Platforms/Social Media
Security
Devices
Policymakers
Stories From Abroad
The Rural Utilities Service, a Rural Development agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), announces the acceptance of applications under the Community Connect Grant (CCG) program for fiscal year (FY) 2025. This notice is being issued prior to passage of an FY 2025 appropriations act in order to allow applicants sufficient time to prepare their applications and give the Agency time to process applications within FY 2025. Based on FY 2024 appropriated funding, RUS estimates that approximately $26 million will be available for FY 2025. These grant funds will be made available to eligible applicants to construct broadband networks that provide service on a community-oriented connectivity basis in rural areas. All applicants are responsible for any expenses incurred in developing their applications. The application window opens on February 20, 2025. Completed applications for grants must be submitted electronically by no later than 11:59 a.m. eastern time (ET), April 21, 2025.
On January 2, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published the Final Bead Alternative Broadband Technology Policy Notice to provide additional guidance to states and territories regarding the use of non-fiber technologies to serve unserved and underserved locations through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. The BEAD Program is designed to deploy broadband service to all unserved and underserved locations in the U.S. The BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), released in May 2022, established a hierarchy of technologies for awarding subgrants for Unserved and Underserved Service Projects. The January 2 policy notice outlines the steps states and territories must take when deciding to award BEAD subgrants to non-fiber broadband deployment projects.
A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) that seek grant money take advantage of in-kind matching rules. In-kind contributions recognize non-cash benefits of property, goods, or services that will benefit a grant project. Many grant programs allow in-kind matches to be used in calculating the matching funds being provided by a grant applicant. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process explicitly allows for in-kind matches, but in-kind matching does not automatically help a grant applicant, and in some cases, it can make it harder to win a grant. The bottom line is that in-kind matching could be a detriment in a BEAD grant application. But this depends on the specific state grant scoring. In-kind can help if a state focuses on the percent of ISP matching and can hurt if the state focuses on cost per passing.
Back in 2024––October, to be exact––the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) over $22 million through the Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program to implement its Digital Connectivity Plan. According to NTIA, two of GTA's priorities are deploying Digital Navigators to help access online education, health, financial, and government services, and expanding access to digital devices, such as upgrading public computer labs and device loan programs. Here we take a look at the full timeline of activities that GTA outlined in its Digital Connectivity Plan.
An impressive milestone is inching its way to completion in North Dakota. In one of the most rural parts of the US, the Peace Garden State is close to being the first in the nation in which every home and business has (or will soon have) access to fiber service, the gold standard of Internet connectivity. An estimated 95 percent of households in North Dakota – including nearly eight out of 10 farms – have access to broadband at speeds of at least 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) while close to 70 percent have access to Gig speed fiber service. It’s why the state’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program allocation is set at only $130 million, just $30 million more than the $100 million minimum. The relatively small amount of BEAD funds for North Dakota in comparison to other states is because there are not many unserved locations left in the state.
Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced a major step forward in expanding multilingual Wireless Emergency Alerts. Based on public feedback, the agency has created templates for the 18 most commonly issued and time-sensitive alerts in the 13 most commonly spoken languages in the U.S., plus English and American Sign Language (ASL). Public safety officials will have the option to use these customizable multilingual template alerts in order to better warn their communities and save lives.
Three massive, concurrent tectonic shifts are reordering in dramatic ways how America and the world will get, and consume, information in the years ahead:
- Trust in traditional media is vanishing.
- Where people are getting information instead has shattered into dozens of ecosystems.
- The world's most powerful social platforms—X, Facebook, Instagram—no longer police speech or information.
In this new information world order, the people with the largest platforms and followings hold more power than ever in shaping reality. That's a seismic shift in how realities are formed in real time.
Every day at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), we work to promote technology in the service of human progress. That has been the throughline of our actions on Internet connectivity, spectrum and tech policy. As I look ahead to my third anniversary and final days as NTIA Administrator, I’m incredibly proud of what we have accomplished to advance technology for people and progress. When I took office three years ago, President Biden had just given us a simple but historic mission: Connect everyone in America to affordable, reliable high-speed Internet service. Today, NTIA has awarded more than $46 billion in broadband funding and connected thousands of families. That includes:
- More than 40,000 homes with new high-speed Internet access through the Broadband Infrastructure Program.
- $1 billion worth of Middle Mile networks, including building over 3,200 miles of fiber and counting.
- 4,500 homes with either new or subsidized Internet connections on Tribal lands.
These programs—and the billions flowing in from private capital—have contributed to major progress: Over 3 million previously unserved homes and business have been connected to the Internet since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Rep Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, announced the Committee’s Subcommittee Chief Counsels for the 119th Congress. Kate O’Connor Harper will serve as Chief Counsel for the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, where she has served for the past 5 years. Kate previously served as the Chief of Staff for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where she worked on legislative and communications policy focused on spectrum and broadband issues. She also worked in NTIA’s Office of Congressional Affairs and engaged with Congress, state government officials, and other federal agencies to advance the Administration’s legislative initiatives on broadband and 5G.
Pretty much everybody at this point knows the U.S. is trying to close its digital divide with the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. But what about the rest of the world?
- China: China in 2013 unveiled a plan to build a nationwide high-speed broadband network by 2020 that would boost download speeds in both urban and rural areas. As of 2023, 95% of internet users in China had access to a broadband connection of 100 Mbps or more.
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Germany: Germany has lagged in fiber penetration with a typical download speed (91 Mbps) just shy of the global 94 Mbps average. The German government in 2022 introduced the “Gigabitstrategie” program. Its mission? To deploy fiber and the latest mobile communications standard to all areas of the country by 2030. As an interim goal, Germany wants to pass 50% of homes with fiber by year-end 2025.
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India: As the most populated country in the world, India’s broadband ambitions match that scale. India in 2011 kicked off the BharatNet project to deliver affordable, high-speed internet to every village in the country, allowing folks in those communities to access opportunities like telehealth and online education. As of December 2024, BharatNet had expanded fiber broadband access to more than 214,000 Indian villages and has installed over 104,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in rural areas.
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Mexico: Mexico’s government in 2019 introduced a campaign for better broadband not unlike the U.S.' Internet For All initiative. It even has the same name: Internet para Todos. The initial objective was to connect everyone in Mexico by the end of 2023 via a combination of fiber, wireless, satellite and hybrid solutions. Rural internet access increased by 60% since 2018, from 10.8 million to 17.5 million people.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org), Grace Tepper (grace AT benton DOT org), and Zoe Walker (zwalker AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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