Comcast announced it will soon start enabling customers to sign up for its Internet Essentials Plus service at the company’s more than 500 Xfinity stores. The offering includes 100 Mbps speed, a cable modem, access to millions of WiFi hotspots, and unlimited data for $29.95 per month and is free to customers eligible for the low-income Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). Comcast is training customer service agents at its call centers to help eligible customers sign up for the Essentials Plus service and educate them about the ACP. Customers eligible for the $30 monthly ACP benefit can apply it to any tier of Xfinity service or Xfinity Mobile service. Comcast is also partnering with its Project UP network of thousands of non-profit organizations in communities across the country to increase awareness of, and participation in the ACP. The company said it has distributed more than $1 million dollars in grants to support dozens of local non-profits affiliated with the Hispanic Federation and the National Urban Indian Family Coalition (NUIFC). Comcast plans to invest millions in these types of programs in 2022.

Since the national dialog has suddenly fixated on inflation, the big ISPs decided to jump into the discussion by claiming that broadband prices are falling. The big ISP industry has been trotting out this untruth for the last several years. What underlies this claim is that the cost per megabit of speed has been falling as ISPs increase speeds. By definition, when an ISP upgrades a customer from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps, the cost per megabit drops. While the cable companies have been unilaterally increasing speeds, consumers have not seen the check they write each month drop. There is no consumer who wouldn’t think that “broadband prices are falling” to mean that monthly bills are dropping. 

As you might expect, the lobbying is becoming hot and heavy to position internet service providers (ISPs) to win the $42.5 billion of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants that will likely start being awarded in 2023. This is one of the most interesting lobbying challenges I’ve ever seen because there is no one central place that will be awarding these grants. Congress gave the responsibility for these grants to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), but the money is going to flow from them to the states. There seems to be a lot of lobbying happening with state legislators, but even that might not be very effective. States must file broadband grant plans that largely follow the rules established by Congress as interpreted by the NTIA. States will have some leeway on how to award grants, but states will still have to follow the basic NTIA rules. I fully expect many states will have bias. This could mean favoring grants for the large incumbents or favoring grants for cooperatives or municipalities. But even states with a bias will have a hard time turning down solid grant applications that includes a significant amount of matching funding from a local government. This raises the big question of who should be lobbied – the NTIA, state legislators, or individual communities? From what I’m seeing, the answer seems to be all of the above.

[Doug Dawson is president of CCG Consulting.]

Gov Greg Abbott (R-TX) and other top elected officials in Texas have plenty of evidence before them of the social, educational and economic consequences for hundreds of thousands of families around the state without broadband internet service at home. Once Congress finally passes enabling legislation, Texas is expected to receive $53 billion from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) signed into law by President Joe Biden in November 2021. Only $100 million of those funds are earmarked for the expansion of broadband service in Texas, enough to deliver service to an estimated 1 million Texas households without service now. The state already has $500 million in American Recovery Plan Act funds intended to improve broadband service in rural communities. Abbott, however, has consistently expressed reservations about accepting federal funding that includes requirements for additional state funding, or funding that could prove to be short-lived. His predecessor, Gov. Rick Perry, believed the same, and as a result, Texas has forgone billions of dollars annually in badly needed Medicaid funding since passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. A crisis creates opportunity, yet accepting or rejecting federal funds likely will be an issue in statewide and legislative races this year. As learned in the pandemic, there are serious consequences when partisan politics trump the public interest. Texas should take the money and invest it wisely.

[Robert Rivard is co-founder and columnist at the San Antonio Report.]

A new analysis by the University of Chicago has revealed vast differences in internet connectivity across Chicago (IL), with some neighborhoods reporting more than one-third of households offline. Researchers are now working to collect their own data to determine how the internet performs across neighborhoods, with the hope of influencing how $65 billion in federal funds to expand broadband access is distributed. Across the city about 80 percent of households have internet access, but researchers with the university’s Internet Equity Initiative found a nearly 40 percentage-point difference in connectivity levels between certain neighborhoods. In the most connected area, the Loop, more than 97 percent of households have internet access. That’s followed by Lake View and the Near North and South sides at 94 percent. But in Burnside that number is under 58 percent, and in West Englewood, less than 62 percent. Now that researchers have determined access is not uniform across the city, they can dig deeper into discrepancies in speed, performance and infrastructure, said Nick Feamster, faculty director of research at the Data Science Institute and a principal investigator of the Internet Equity Initiative. “Given better answers to all of those sub-questions we can then start to think about solutions and investment, … really trying to go hyper-local,” Feamster said. “Because the problem, although it’s popular to talk about as a national problem, is really a local problem. It varies so much across the city, and there is no data on that until now.” For the next step of the study, researchers will work with volunteers in 75 households and across 30 community areas, with a particular focus on Logan Square and South Shore.

Imagine Idaho Foundation will conduct a state-wide internet speed-testing campaign. Data from the campaign will be mapped by GEO Map. The campaign aims to collect data on underserved and unserved Idahoans that can be utilized to challenge Federal Communications Commission 477 reporting and help Idaho counties apply for grant funding for broadband infrastructure projects. All costs associated with the speed-testing campaign are grant-funded by Imagine Idaho Foundation. “Relying on data from FCC 477 reporting will potentially leave millions of dollars in funding for broadband on the table,” said Imagine Idaho Foundation Co-Founder Christina Culver. “That’s why it is important for counties to conduct their own speed-testing campaigns that will produce granular data - giving them an advantage when grant portals open,” she added. The collection of this data will be down to the household level - providing an accurate depiction of how many underserved and unserved Idahoans there are.” “This course of action is exactly what Idaho needs to get its fair share of funding,” said Culver.

Because the cost of producing information technology (IT) products is lower overseas, applying Buy America provisions to IT components of projects underwritten by the infrastructure bill will raise costs, reduce infrastructure build, and delay project completion—all without creating any net new jobs. Congress included in the recent infrastructure bill stronger applications of Buy America provisions, which govern the extent to which federal government purchases must be of products substantially made in the United States. The US share of global computer and electronics output had already fallen 8.2 percentage points between 1999 and 2009 when the Obama administration provide a blanket waiver for IT products in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Since then, US domestic IT capabilities have weakened even more, dropping another 2.3 percentage points of global market share. Because of this, applying Buy America provisions to IT components of federal infrastructure investment would raise IT costs by approximately 25 percent, on average. Boosting US manufacturing output is critical but applying Buy America provisions to information technology will do little to reshore IT production. It will, however, reduce the amount of US infrastructure that is built.