Join us live on Thursday, July 21st, at 5pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) to talk about all the recent broadband news fit to print.

This includes everything from the Notice of Inquiry on updating the definition of broadband to 100/20 Megabits per second (Mbps) by Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, to recent announcements of public/private partnerships, to what will happen with some of the national ISPs getting more subsidies to expand Internet access, to expectations around the Buy America provisions of key broadband subsidies.

Subscribe to the show using this feed on YouTube Live or here on Facebook Live, on find it on the Connect This! page.

Email us broadband@muninetworks.org with feedback and ideas for the show.

Watch here on YouTube Live, here on Facebook live, or below.

For more than a year and a half, the nation’s top telecommunications regulator has been stuck in limbo, thanks to a combination of federal dysfunction and industry lobbying. Now the nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC is facing a full frontal assault by telecom monopolies dedicated to preventing the agency from standing up to monopoly power.

After an inexplicable nine-month delay, President Biden nominated consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC late last year. Sohn, Co-Founder and CEO of consumer group Public Knowledge and a former advisor to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, is well versed in media and telecom policy, and broadly popular across both sides of the aisle. 

Yet since her belated nomination, Sohn has been met with a bevy of telecom, media-industry, and politically constructed allegations designed to derail her nomination, ranging from false claims that she’d harm rural America, manufactured allegations that she hates police, and false assertions that she’s looking to censor conservative voices in media. 

All of these efforts serve one function: to ensure the nation’s top telecommunications regulator remains mired in partisan gridlock and a 2-2 commissioner voting split. Without a clear voting majority, the agency can’t embrace reforms that are widely popular with the public, whether that’s restoring the FCC’s consumer protection authority, or restoring recently-discarded media consolidation rules.

On Monday last week, the White House made much ado of an announcement that it had secured commitments from a collection of large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to adjust speed tiers and monthly costs for their existing plans so as to be able to offer a $30/month, minimum 100 megabit per second (Mbps) download offering for low-income households across the country. The goal was to create plans for households that qualify for the $14.2 billion Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) to get access to faster connections while ensuring no additional out-of-pocket costs. The recent White House announcement said that the 20 private-sector providers that have joined together cover 80 percent of households (skewed towards urban areas).

There’s no argument that the move will directly benefit hundreds of thousands of households by boosting their wireline connections and reducing their monthly expenses. And yet, it’s a treatment of the symptom rather than the disease, as the administration continues to refuse to address the larger structural dynamics that have made Internet access increasingly expensive in this country and perpetuated a broken marketplace via poor regulation and a lack of strong leadership.

This will become immediately apparent the moment that the Affordable Connectivity Program runs out of money, and those households suddenly face higher costs with no option for recourse. Our analysis shows that even if only a third of eligible households ultimately enroll (ten percent more households than are enrolled today), absent an additional allocation, the fund will be exhausted by the beginning of November 2024. But even under the best-case scenario, with the benefit reaching as many people as possible, current enrollment rates show that only 68 percent of eligible households will be able to sign up before the funds run out. In this model, the money will be exhausted just 18 months from now, on January 1st, 2024.

A Necessary Benefit, But There Are Enrollment Disparities

In this episode of the Connect This! Show, co-hosts Christopher Mitchell and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) are joined by guests Brian Mefford (VETRO FiberMap) and Lori Adams (Nokia) to talk about the FCC's Fabric initiative, and the latest in data collection and mapping.

This week's show will focus on broadband mapping and data collection and how the FCC’s new collection and verification process differs from 477 data. They will also cover whether Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are ready and if ISPs truly understand the process, as well as dive into the promise and perils of crowd sourcing information; what information states should submit that they have collected through their own mapping processes; the challenge process; and the efficacy of speed test data before concluding with a discussion about when the final FCC maps may be ready for prime time.

Subscribe to the show using this feed on YouTube Live or here on Facebook Live, on find it on the Connect This! page.

Email us broadband@muninetworks.org with feedback and ideas for the show.

Watch here on YouTube Live, here on Facebook live, or below.

Written by Christine Parker

See the interactive resource, United State(s) of Broadband Map, here. Updated on June 1, 2022.

View and download an HTML version of the map here. To view, open it in any web browser.

Updates can be shared with Christine Parker at christine@ilsr.org.

*If at any point the HTML file stops working, it's because the map has been updated. Just return to this story or that dropbox folder and redownload the file at the link above.

Tens of billions of dollars in federal funding are poised for new broadband infrastructure deployment over the next five years. But a crucial step in allocating funds from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program - for states and local governments - lies in knowing where fast, affordable, reliable broadband access currently is, so that they know where to drive new investment. The FCC’s historical and repeated failure to put together an accurate national broadband map threatens to significantly hold up the process.

What is digital equity? And why is access to ubiquitous, reliable and affordable high-speed Internet service so vital? The technological issues involved can sometimes seem confusing, especially for those who came of age before the Internet fundamentally transformed how we interact.

That’s why the Institute for Local Self Reliance, with support from AARP, has created the Exploring Digital Equity Fact Sheet Series. The series contains six user-friendly, easy-to-understand fact sheets to help demystify the challenges associated with creating digital equity.

We are releasing the entire series today, while AARP will feature the fact sheets as part of its Livable Communities initiative, an effort to support neighborhoods, towns, cities and rural areas in creating safe, walkable streets; age-friendly housing and transportation options; access to needed services; and opportunities for residents of all ages to participate in community life. 

Both ILSR and AARP have created landing pages for the fact sheets as well. You can find our landing page here, and the fact sheet landing page for AARP here.

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The fact sheets series ultimately highlight how expanding Internet access to everyone who wants it isn’t an infrastructure problem alone. Achieving digital equity for everyone in a community is a multi-faceted endeavor, and requires engaging and activating an array of stakeholders. The Exploring Digital Equity Fact Sheet Series unpacks the issues, challenges, and opportunities today.

Next Tuesday, from 10am to 2pm PST, the California Public Utilities Commission will be hosting its annual public workshop “to facilitate collaboration among regional consortia, stakeholders, local governments, existing facility-based broadband providers and consumers regarding cost-effective strategies to reach the broadband access goal.” 

The agenda will feature panels on state and federal funding, an introduction to the new California Advanced Services Fund infrastructure team to talk about mapping and the state’s line extension program, a presentation from Cruzio Internet on a pilot project it recently completed, and a conversation about rulemaking related to public housing, consortia, and broadband adoption. 

ILSR’s Christopher Mitchell is joining the panel at 10:25am PST on Funding Local Broadband Networks, along with representatives from Anza Electric Cooperative, Next Century Cities, and UC Davis.

See the full agenda and join info here. Find the presentations from the event after the fact here.

Buoyed by an explosion in new grants and the recent elimination of state restrictions on community broadband deployments, Washington State is awash in freshly-funded local broadband proposals that should go a long way toward shoring up affordable Internet access across the Pacific Northwest. 

In addition to Covid relief and various state grants, thirteen Washington State counties, ports and Tribal associations recently received $145 million in Broadband Infrastructure Acceleration grants aimed at boosting Internet access and affordability statewide. It’s the first tranche of $260 million planned for new infrastructure, and particularly exciting because it looks like nearly all of the funds went to community-led endeavors, with many of the newly built networks operated by local governments. Some projects will result in partnerships with locally rooted providers.

“Infrastructure is the foundation for digital equity,” Washington Commerce Director Lisa Brown said of the funding. “Washington state’s goal is to ensure all of our residents have access to affordable high-speed internet, as well as the devices, skills and confidence needed to connect with critical resources.”

State leaders say they received more than $413 million-worth of requests for 36 different projects, and have shared both a list and a map of all approved grants online. 

Essential Aid for Existing Projects

With a little less than a year left in its projected build schedule, Fort Collins (pop. 168,000) continues to make progress on its municipal fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network, while also releasing new resources to help keep citizens informed and help households with affordability challenges stay online. 

When we last checked in on Fort Collins' Connexion a little more than a year ago, the network was nearing a milestone, having spent roughly 49 percent of its construction budget. Today, the network is well over the halfway point of its $142 million-dollar build. In fact, it expects to be done placing vaults and with boring work in July.

Along the way, local officials have taken steps to increase transparency and improve communication with local residents. Last summer, it released a construction map of the networks' anticipated 357 fiberhoods, delineating which areas were in design, under construction, or fully lit.

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In addition, at the end of November of 2020 the network released a Network Status tracker so that users could see in each of the four quadrants of the city if connections were down. 

The FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Reverse Auction was completed a little more than a year ago to much fanfare and spilled ink, and though we’ve seen irregular updates over the last twelve months, we thought it worth the time to round up what we know so far in an effort to see where we’re at and determine what is likely to come.

The RDOF was built to award up to $20.4 billion in grants over 10 years using competitive reverse auctions generally won by the lowest bidder. The money comes from the Universal Service Fund fees affixed to consumers’ monthly telecom bills. The previous FCC announced $9.2 billion in auction winners in December of 2020. 

To date the FCC has announced five rounds of Authorized funding released, six rounds of applicants whose bids they have decided are Ready-to-Authorize, and three rounds of Default bids. In total, a little more than half of the $9.2 billion won during the auction has been handed out as of January 14th, 2022, with another $1.3 billion announced on January 28th as ready to be disbursed shortly.

It’s clear that the final picture is still taking shape, but looking at things a year later leaves us feeling a little better than we were immediately after the auction closed. To date, it appears the FCC is closely scrutinizing many of the bidders that most worried industry veterans and broadband advocates, while releasing funds for projects that will bring future-proof connectivity to hundreds of thousands of homes over the next ten years.

Moving Slowly on Problematic Awards

The biggest news so far is that of the top ten winners, seven look to have received no funds at all (see table below or high-resolution version here). That’s $4.1 billion worth of bids for almost 1.9 million locations, and includes LTD Broadband, SpaceX’s Starlink, AMG Technologies (NextLink), Frontier, Resound Networks, Starry (Connect Everyone), and CenturyLink. This is a big deal.