Infrastructure

The Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law devotes $65 billion to a moon shot mission, involving all 50 states and U.S. territories, to bridge the digital divide once and for all.

In November 2023, the Empire State Development’s ConnectALL Office released the draft New York State Digital Equity Plan and sought public comment on how New York will bridge the digital divide in the state.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) included $42.45 billion for broadband funding across the country, made available through the National Technology and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) sent comments to the NTIA prior to the release of the agency’s guidance for the BEAD program, urging the agency to “take a vendor and technology neutral approach to issuing grant funding,” and avoid supporting government owned networks, among other recommendations. After these recommendations were

One of the most perplexing requirements for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program is that state broadband plans must include a middle-class affordability plan to make sure that all consumers have access to affordable broadband. I don’t know anybody who fully understands what this means.

For the better part of a generation, low-income and minority US communities have struggled to gain access to affordable broadband.

The Task Force for Reviewing the Connectivity and Technology Needs of Precision Agriculture in the United States finds that access to broadband infrastructure is not readily available in rural America, despite it having become a fundamental necessity. The Task Force seeks to address these gaps with recommendations that advise the federal government on ways it can improve access to reliable, scalable, and low latency broadband access, specifically on rural and agricultural lands.

In this Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture (NAL), the Federal Communications Commission identifies two Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Phase I Auction (Auction 904) applicants that defaulted on their bids for support on August 10, 2022, and May 23, 2023, in apparent violation of the FCC’s rules (see applicants below). In light of the applicants’ defaults spanning 7,482 Census Block Groups (CBGs), this NAL proposes forfeitures for each of the two Auction 904 defaulters. The proposed forfeitures assessed here total $22,446,000.

As fiber deployments grow, Comcast President Mike Cavanaugh thinks the company is well-positioned to handle the competition. “We’re very focused on the key competitor over the long term being fiber,” Cavanaugh said “The good news is we’ve competed against fiber for 20 years, we know how to compete against [it].” What’s driving the current competitive landscape, Cavanaugh went on to say, is “low move activity” and “the entry of fixed wireless.” He noted it’s difficult to say “which one is more significant.” Cavanaugh predicts fixed wireless access (FWA) will “run for a while,” but said Comca

Brightspeed’s origin story isn’t typical for the telecommunications industry, at least not for a company of its size. It all started with an investment premise that Apollo Global Management wanted to test. That premise: “If we invested in an under-invested wireline company, could we turn it into a growth company?” Apollo negotiated a deal to buy CenturyLink’s local service business in 20 states, which appeared to be an excellent place to test the premise. Only 2 to 3 percent of the footprint that Apollo bought from CenturyLink had been upgraded to fiber when the ownership was transferred.

Charter celebrated the $1.3 billion that the company is investing in rural areas of Texas. Charter will invest $700 million of the money to cover the full cost of network upgrades. The remaining $420 million will cover some of the cost of fiber deployment. The remainder of the cost of fiber deployment will come partially from money Charter won in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program in 2020, and partially from public-private partnerships with counties and cities.