Five states will participate in a policy academy on cybersecurity, the National Governors Association said in a news release Thursday. Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Nevada and Oregon will participate in the academy, which will cover developing and implementing comprehensive cybersecurity strategies, NGA said. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), co-chairs of NGA’s Resource Center for State Cybersecurity, will serve as faculty for the policy academy. “Threats to our cybersecurity remain one of the most significant homeland security challenges facing the nation,” McAuliffe said. “This opportunity will allow states to learn effective cybersecurity practices to better safeguard citizens.” Snyder said, “Cyber threats affect everyone from law enforcement, public works and energy agencies, to financial and communications sectors and ultimately, citizens of every state. This policy academy will help states develop strategic plans to enhance their cybersecurity capabilities and improve incident response planning.” Earlier this month, NGA announced a separate policy academy on emergency communications interoperability (see 1604070058).

NTIA released a guide to planning a community broadband strategy. An effective broadband road map “contains a community’s strategic vision and goals, analyzes existing community resources and needs, and guides the tactical plans to realize this vision,” NTIA said in a blog post Thursday. “An effective roadmap will also identify potential collaborations that can lead to additional businesses, programs and economic growth.” The guide includes nine case studies from states, counties, tribes, municipalities and nongovernment organizations. It was released through NTIA’s BroadbandUSA program, which provides technical assistance, guidance and resources to communities seeking to expand broadband. The agency said it next plans to release guides on forming broadband partnerships, implementing infrastructure projects and sustaining broadband networks.

The Iowa Utilities Board issued a request for proposal to select a service provider for the state’s telecom relay service, Relay Iowa, and captioned telephone relay service, CapTel Relay. The board plans to award a three-year contract -- Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2019 -- with one possible three-year extension, according to the RFP. The board will use a formal competitive process to choose the provider, and plans to announce the contract on or about Sept. 20, it said. Proposals are due June 30. Relay Iowa provides phone accessibility in English and Spanish, to people who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, deaf-blind or have difficulty speaking. CapTel Relay service enables users to view word-for-word captions of phone conversations and requires the use of a specialized captioned telephone.

States should develop advanced cyber analytics capabilities, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers urged as it released a report Thursday. States also should develop and maintain response systems to keep pace with cyberthreats, NASCIO said. Multi-vector attacks by cybercriminals require states to be able to correlate disparate data sources from different security tools, it said. “Advanced persistent threats will become more and more sophisticated,” said NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson. “States must move away from merely waiting for the next attack and respond to a more predictive stance in anticipating attacks so they can put necessary defense in place in advance.” NASCIO released a states’ guide to cyberdisruption response planning earlier this month (see 1604070062).

The Louisiana House unanimously passed a telehealth bill to remove the requirement that physicians be located within the state. The House voted 91-0 Wednesday to pass HB-570, two days after the state Senate passed a similar bill, SB-328. The legislature has until June 6 adjournment to agree on which bill to move forward. Teladoc supported both versions of the bill for removing the residency restriction and for being technology neutral (see 1604190011). The Alaska Legislature removed its own in-state restriction for telehealth last week (see 1604180054). State legislation on telehealth has ramped up year after year, said a Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP) annual report released Thursday. “In the 2016 legislative session, forty-four states have introduced over 150 telehealth-related pieces of legislation,” it said. “Many bills address different aspects of reimbursement in regards to both private payers and Medicaid, with some bills making changes to existing reimbursement laws. Many states have also proposed legislation that would adopt the Federation of State Medical Board’s model language for an Interstate Medical Licensure Compact.” Some states continue to restrict and limit telehealth services, CCHP said. “No two states are alike in how telehealth is defined and regulated.” CCHP said 47 states have some form of reimbursement for telehealth, but Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Utah don't. The most commonly reimbursed form of telehealth is live video, it said. “However, what and how it is reimbursed varies widely. The spectrum ranges from a Medicaid program in a state like Connecticut, which will only reimburse for case management behavioral health services for clients under the age of eighteen, to states like California, which reimburses for live video across a wide variety of medical specialties.” Only nine states reimburse for store-and-forward services, in which clinical information like X-rays are stored and then forwarded to another site, because many states define telehealth as real-time, it said. Only 16 states reimburse for remote patient monitoring, the same number as in 2015, it said. On location, some states continue to restrict reimbursable telehealth to rural or underserved areas, but this is decreasing, CCHP said. Also, 23 states specify what sites can serve as an originating site for telehealth, it said.

General Communications (GCI) proposed revised LTE performance commitments to go along with the Alaska Plan that it and others are urging the FCC to adopt for wireless and rate-of-return wireline carrier broadband USF support in the state. While some aspects remain preliminary and subject to refinement, the proposals reflect "a commitment to move all fiber-backhaul areas, and the substantial majority of microwave-backhaul population, to LTE within ten years," GCI said in a filing Wednesday in docket 10-90. "Moreover, GCI will be implementing LTE-over-satellite to approximately half of the population served by satellite backhaul, and will be moving at least 3,000 POPs from satellite backhaul to microwave." GCI is targeting 2 Mbps downlink speeds and 800 kbps uplink speeds for the vast majority of LTE-served POPs. It urged the FCC to adopt the Alaska Plan rules and approve carrier performance plans in the same order "if at all possible." The filing also answered FCC staff questions about GCI's methodology for determining which Alaska census blocks are "served" by AT&T or Verizon LTE systems and which wouldn't be eligible for future support. Alaska Communications, the state's price-cap telco, recently objected to the Alaska Telephone Association's wireless USF proposal, saying it would provide $1 billion over 10 years to competitors, much of it a "windfall" underwriting "GCI's unregulated middle-mile monopoly" (see 1604190012).

States tend to fund broadband deployment more than they do adoption, said a state broadband report released Wednesday. The Rural Telecommunications Congress, a nonprofit headed by Drew Clark, commissioned broadband economists at the Strategic Networks Group to write the report. About 52 percent of states have an office dedicated to broadband, and 28 percent have a budget to fund broadband initiatives, the report said. (The study included only 48 states because Rhode Island and New Jersey declined to participate.) While California has $330 million and New York has $500 million for broadband, the average funding for the 11 other funded states was $597,000 annually, the report found. States with broadband funding said they most often support “planning and support” activities (82 percent) and infrastructure (45 percent), the report said. SNG President Michael Curri said “investment activities seem to be heavily weighted towards the ‘supply’ of broadband and include mapping, infrastructure planning, and grants, surpassing economic development activities that impact economic advancement including raising awareness, training, and driving end-user utilization.” The report ranked New Mexico the highest on its broadband efforts, followed by Maine, Ohio, New York and Vermont. The worst-ranked five states were Indiana (44), Louisiana (45), Montana (46), Missouri (47) and Texas (48), it said. The ranking was based on five dimensions, SNG said. On availability, SNG said the top three states were New Mexico, Maine and Hawaii, with Montana in last place. On adoption, the top three states were New Hampshire, Hawaii and Oregon, with Alabama in last place. On how well states drove “meaningful use” of broadband by businesses and households, SNG found Ohio performed the best, Vermont and West Virginia were tied for second, and Tennessee did the worst. On growth investment, New York came in first, with Nevada and North Carolina tied for second, SNG said. SNG also considered regulatory environment, but didn’t rank the states within this specific metric.

Pennsylvania will open government data to the public in machine-readable format, under an executive order issued this week by Gov. Tom Wolf (D). The executive order directs the Office of Administration to establish a central repository for open data published by state agencies, and help agencies identify, secure and release data sets. It requires agencies to protect sensitive information. “One of our most valuable and underutilized resources in state government is data,” he said in a news release Tuesday. “Our goal is to make data available in order to engage citizens, create economic opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs, and develop innovative policy solutions that improve program delivery and streamline operations.” The open data portal is expected to launch this summer, the governor’s office said. “Making government data easily accessible benefits the public in many ways,” said Erik Arneson, executive director of the Office of Open Records. “Experience has shown that a good state-level open data portal will lead to cost savings for the government, opportunities for businesses, and more information for citizens.” Philadelphia and a western Pennsylvania group -- including Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and the University of Pittsburgh -- had open data initiatives before the state executive order. At the federal level, Democratic and Republican members of Congress last week unveiled legislation to require the government to share data by default (see 1604140027).

The Louisiana Senate unanimously passed a telehealth bill to remove the requirement that physicians be located within the state. The state Senate voted 34-0 Monday to pass SB-328 and send it to the House, one day after the Alaska Legislature passed Medicaid legislation that similarly removed in-state restrictions for telehealth (see 1604180054). Alaska and Louisiana were the last two states to have an in-state requirement. The Louisiana bill “ensures technology-neutral modalities for telemedicine, and it removes the onerous residency restriction,” Teladoc Vice President-Government Affairs Claudia Tucker said in an interview. The bill defines telehealth broadly to not exclude any current or future technologies to deliver telemedicine, she said. SB-328 now moves to the House, which is expected to consider a similar bill, HB-570, Wednesday. The Louisiana Legislature adjourns June 6, but the telehealth legislation could be passed before then, Tucker said. “They are moving at warp speed,” she said. “I’ve never seen a bill move out of committee as quickly as I saw [SB-328] get out of the Senate committee.” One obstacle to passage could be the State Board of Medical Examiners, which objected to removing the in-state requirement. Teladoc is pushing for telehealth legislation to enhance access in other states, Tucker said. The Missouri Legislature has a final floor vote this week on telehealth legislation, and the Michigan Senate has a floor vote this week, she said. Economic concerns are driving movement on state telehealth bills this year, Tucker said. “Healthcare costs are spiraling out of control ... and will continue to do so at an unsustainable rate.” And people want the greater access to care that is provided by telemedicine, she said.

Mobile backhaul company Siklu is in talks with several communities about municipal broadband projects in which it can install millimeter wave radios to wirelessly extend the reach of fiber, Director-Business Development Boris Maysel said in an interview. “There is a huge demand in municipal broadband,” Maysel said. “There is a deep understanding that broadband is the railways or airports of the 21st century, so they need to invest in broadband in order to retain businesses and attract new businesses.” Siklu’s model is to partner with a city and a private ISP responsible for operating the muni network, he said. Earlier this month, the company announced a muni broadband project in Santa Cruz, California, where it will connect radios to existing fiber from independent ISP Cruzio to provide 1 Gbps speeds wirelessly (see 1604050021). Siklu chose Santa Cruz after searching for a city with a service provider where it could “showcase” millimeter wave technology on top of an existing fiber network, Maysel said. Siklu plans to roll out its radios over the next 10 weeks to 17 locations in Santa Cruz, he said. The locations include public housing, community centers and business locations, and the wireless network will cover most of downtown, he said. It's Siklu’s first public-private partnership on muni broadband, and the company plans to unveil projects in additional communities soon, he said. Siklu uses millimeter wave technology to provide multi-gigabit speeds over wireless, which costs less than connecting fiber to each premise in the last mile. Millimeter wave takes advantage of large capacities at super-high frequencies. For example, from 57 to 64 GHz, there is 7 gigahertz of unlicensed spectrum, “which is more than all the unlicensed bands put together in lower frequencies,” Maysel said. The technology is free of interference due to the narrowness of the antennas, he said. The FCC is looking at ways to release more spectrum in the millimeter wave bands (see 1604130062).