Biden Reveals First-Round Broadband Grant Awards
Vice President Joe Biden announced Thursday $182 million in broadband grants for 18 projects, in the first round of NTIA and RUS funding under the stimulus law. The grants benefit projects in 17 states and are matched by more than $46 million in private capital, Biden’s office said. A report by the president’s National Economic Council highlighted some of the winning projects, which aim to build last- and middle-mile infrastructure, connect community institutions and promote digital literacy and economic development.
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“These critical broadband investments will create tens of thousands of jobs and stimulate the economy in the near term,” said the National Economic Council. “By providing broadband-enabled opportunities to previously underserved communities, these investments will also lay the foundation for long-term regional economic development and foster a digitally literate workforce that can compete in the new knowledge-based economy.”
Two awards for middle-mile projects will go to public private-partnerships, the council said. One is a $39.7 million grant for a project in rural upstate New York by the ION company and the Development Authority of the North Country that will connect more than 100 anchor institutions and support connections to 250,000 households and 38,000 businesses, it said. Meanwhile, a partnership among service providers and the University of Maine got a $25.4 million grant to build three fiber rings across rural Maine. The 1,100-mile network will serve 100 communities with 110,000 households, 600 anchor institutions and several last-mile providers, the Council said. It will also connect 10 University of Maine campuses and outreach centers, three community colleges and 38 government facilities, the Council said.
Middle-mile awards weren’t limited to partnerships. The administration gave a $33.5 million grant to the North Georgia Network Cooperative to build a 260-mile fiber ring in eight poor counties in the Appalachian region of North Carolina and northern Georgia. The ring will connect 245 institutions and include 2,600 interconnection points allowing ISPs to build out last-mile connections to 24,000 households in unserved areas. Meanwhile, The Consolidated Electric Cooperative will receive $2.4 million to build a 166-mile network in North Central Ohio, connecting 16 electric substations to support a smart grid effort, and allowing CEC to sell fiber to customers and last-mile providers.
A last-mile grant for Rivada Sea Lion will bring low- cost broadband to 30,000 residents in 53 unserved, tribal communities in southwestern Alaska for the first time, the council said. Rivada plans to build a 4G wireless broadband network spanning 90,000 square miles. The administration also gave a last-mile grant to Bretton Woods Telephone in New Hampshire for a fiber-to-the-home project that will connect 386 households, 19 businesses and six institutions with two- way, 20 Mbps broadband.
The council highlighted a public computer center grant to the Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records, which will provide additional public computers to 84 libraries. The Arizona State Library expects the computer centers to serve 450,000 residents and 75,000 users per week, the council said.
Free Press praised the administration’s emphasis on middle-mile grants. Policy Director Ben Scott said the middle-mile is “an often overlooked piece of the broadband puzzle that is essential to ensuring that consumers in these areas have access to affordable broadband services that can scale as demand grows.”
The city of Boston will receive just more than $1.9 million from the NTIA’s BTOP program, officials said. The grant will go toward a project by three community anchors to provide upgraded and expanded hardware, software and public computing training in 26 public libraries, 11 public housing developments and 16 Centers for Youth and Families in Boston.
The Benton Foundation supported measuring the results of the stimulus funding. The stimulus agencies should require recipients to collect detailed information, said foundation CEO Charles Benton and Kate Williams, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois. They said the data should be included in a carefully built database with a powerful search engine. Openness, public access for academic study and government analysis are critical, they said. Without meaningful data collection and analysis, the results of the broadband stimulus program will be vulnerable to the “vagaries of politics, uninformed media analysis, inevitable misunderstandings” and “intentional misinterpretations,” they said.
The Telecommunications Industry Association hopes the rest of the broadband stimulus money, in both rounds, is allocated very quickly, said President Grant Seiffert.