Local/Municipal

The City of Eagle (ID) is putting most of its federal COVID relief dollars to work building a city-wide broadband network. In the past two years, Eagle has spent $4.7 million of its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds toward planning and developing a network of broadband fiber in the Boise suburb.

In January 2020, former-Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-NY) announced New York City’s Internet Master Plan, setting a path to deliver broadband for low-income New Yorkers by investing in public fiber infrastructure.

Delphi's (IN) fiber internet project, Broadway Broadband, officially broke ground.

Private and public partnerships are helping 214 Vermont towns get hooked up to broadband through a communications union district (CUD). Per Vermont statute, CUDs can’t be funded by general obligation bonds. There are 10 CUDs in the state and more than $124 million has been deployed in state and federal funding.

Broadband expansion is the goal of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program, but the initiative won’t be successful without a sufficient focus on digital equity and community engagement, said NTIA officials.

Cell network coverage maps have always been dubiously accurate in the US, and even the ones released by the Federal Communication Commission in 2021 come with a ton of asterisks. A company called Ranlytics is hoping to make a much more accurate picture by attaching equipment to some of the mail trucks that are already driving to many locations in the US to deliver parcels and letters.

Westminster City (CO) officials have signed a deal with Google Fiber to bring high-speed internet to the city. The deal will make gig-speed fiber internet available to those in the city. Construction of the fiber optic network will start in 2023 in the city's right of way and easements.

Only a few blocks separate Amarillo’s lively, bustling downtown area from the city’s historic El Barrio district. While much of the city has spotty internet, residents in El Barrio are almost completely disconnected. The residents are determined to give current and future families more than the bare minimum.

Some low-income households in New York City will receive free broadband internet under a plan announced by Mayor Eric Adams (D-NY) during his State of the City address. Households with Section 8 vouchers in the Bronx and northern Manhattan boroughs of the city will be part of a pilot program that gives them access to free broadband. Pilot participants will be provided with access through the creation of a wireless mesh network.

One of the most striking developments of the last decade has been the rapid “digitalization” of work—and with it, an urgent demand for skill-building. Digitalization is the infusion of digital skills (though not necessarily higher-end software coding) into the texture of almost every job in the economy. And it has inordinate power to both empower workers or divide them. That’s because gaps in access to digital skills engender disparate access to the nation’s best-paying, most desirable jobs and industries.