This story has been updated.
Connecticut to receive more than $144 million in federal funding to help expand state’s broadband networks and ensure, for the first time, that every home and business in the state has access to reliable, high-speed Internet .
The federal grant is part of a larger $42.45 billion national program that was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Congress passed in November 2021.
President Joe Biden held a press conference on Monday to announce the launch of the new connectivity program and pledged that the massive spending program would ensure that every person in America could subscribe to reliable high-speed Internet service by 2030 .
This isn’t the first time the federal government has made significant investments in expanding Internet service across the country, but federal and state officials argued this week that Internet access has become even more vital after the coronavirus pandemic. coronavirus, which has made a high-speed connection necessary for work, school and healthcare.
“High-speed internet is no longer a luxury. It has become an absolute necessity,” Biden said at a White House press conference.
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Federal officials decided how much each state would receive from the new funding stream, which is formally known as the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, based on an analysis of how many residents currently lack Internet access and what it will cost to increase the number of physical connections.
Connecticut is relatively affluent compared to other parts of the country when it comes to the number of residents with access to high-speed internet. But federal data and state reports show that there are still pockets in the state where households are unserved or underserved, meaning available Internet plans aren’t considered adequate.
According to a press release from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, approximately 11,693 homes and small businesses in Connecticut do not have access to a high-speed Internet connection.
The 2022 Connecticut Broadband Report found that most of these homes and businesses are concentrated in about nine cities in the northwest corner and rural areas in the eastern half of the state.
Under federal guidelines for the new program, a location is considered “underserved” if the existing connection can’t deliver download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of at least 20 megabits per second.
A household is considered “underserved” even if it cannot access download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second and upload speeds of at least 3 megabits per second.
Gov. Ned Lamont released a statement on Monday saying the new wave of federal money will help bring everyone in the state up to the high-speed standard. But he also argued that it was just one step toward the state’s more ambitious goal of providing so-called gigabit Internet service to every corner of the state.
“This funding will help us connect residents and unserved and underserved small businesses in our state, leveling the playing field as we work toward our goal of universal access at download speeds of one gigabit per second and upload speeds of That 100 megabits per second is becoming the industry standard,” Lamont said.
This could be the goal of the state. But for rural Connecticut residents, the priority is still making sure that every household has at least the basic level of high-speed Internet access.
Jill Drew has been working continuously towards this goal at Sharon for more than four years.
Drew, who runs a documentary company, is the leader of a group known as the Sharon Connect Task Force.
In that position, Drew studied how many of his neighbors in the small town of about 3,000 people didn’t have high-speed internet and helped develop a plan to reach those families.
That work, Drew said, could serve as a case study for other cities that are looking to connect to some of the more remote parts of the state.
When Drew became involved with Sharon in 2019, she said, they found that about 250 homes in the city were unserved or underserved by local internet carriers.
“We basically drove every street in Sharon and walked it, trying to see what lines were on the light poles,” Drew said. “It was a real legwork.”
What they found was that most of the unserved and underserved homes were on some 28 miles of road that was so sparsely populated that it made no financial sense for existing private Internet providers to install fiber optic or other lines in those places.
“People who lived on these unfortunate streets wouldn’t have had high-speed internet,” he said.
As a result, the Sharon Connect Internet Task Force began evaluating what it would take to build and operate a city-owned Internet network that could reach every home in the city.
They conducted a feasibility study to determine how much it would cost and asked city residents if they would subscribe to the new city broadband service. That plan eventually ended, however, when the city learned it would cost about $12.5 million to build that network and another $250,000 annually to hire a contractor to maintain the system.
But Drew and the other volunteers in town didn’t stop there. At that point, they entered into discussions with Comcast and Frontier, the two existing Internet providers in the area, to discuss how much it might cost to expand the companies’ existing networks to reach the 250 or so homes without service.
Both companies submitted bids to the city, and eventually Sharon residents voted in 2022 to spend $1.6 million to incentivize Comcast to expand into parts of the city where it wasn’t already located.
Whether federal money will be used in exactly the same way remains to be seen.
Officials at the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, who will help administer federal funds, said the agency will solicit applications for infrastructure projects focused on connecting underserved and underserved areas of the state. And they said applicants are likely to consist of “a wide variety of vendors.”
Drew believes municipalities with existing loopholes in their local Internet networks should be prepared to ask for parts of that money, whether they intend to do what Sharon did or develop their own city-owned Internet networks.
“Cities are going to have to figure out how they want to deal with it,” Drew said. “Do they want to try and make a city-owned network? Do they want to collaborate with an incumbent supplier?”
Drew hopes that the Internet construction underway in Sharon will also be eligible for a portion of the $144 million in federal money, even though planning for that work preceded the grant announcement.
“We’ll apply,” Drew said. “And I would be very upset if, for some reason, we were told that we don’t qualify.”
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Image Source : ctmirror.org