As ILSR continues to support local communities in solving Internet connectivity challenges, the Community Broadband Networks (CBN) team has kicked off a new initiative deep in the heart of Texas we are calling the Digital Opportunity Lab.

It mixes elements from the on-going Tribal Broadband Bootcamps with ingredients from CBN’s community engagement work to create a customizable-program in support of digital equity coalitions and community leaders amid a national effort to unlock the participatory benefits of broadband for all.

“Our focus isn’t on telling communities what they should or shouldn’t do,” ILSR Community Broadband Networks Director Christopher Mitchell explained. “We zero in on demystifying the technology involved, illuminating the digital landscape as it functions today, and share what we’ve learned and distilled after nearly two decades of documenting what local communities are doing to bridge multiple digital divides.”

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Digital Opportunity Lab Debut

In a colonia outside of Pharr, Texas – nestled in the Rio Grande Valley – the first Digital Opportunity Lab convened last week with a focus on high school-aged students.

The nonprofit digital equity organization Connect Humanity has struck a new partnership with Microsoft to fund the deployment of affordable broadband access to long neglected residents of Appalachia.

The new partnership, outlined in a recent announcement, will leverage the Connect Humanity’s IDEA Fund (Investing in Digital Equity Appalachia) to help finance community-focused Internet Service Providers (ISPs) “best placed to meet the digital needs of residents and businesses in Appalachia’s unserved areas.”

Appalachia – which technically stretches from the Catskill Mountains in New York State to the hills of Mississippi – continues to be among the least connected areas in the nation. Appalachian residents are 31 percent more likely than the national population to lack a broadband subscription, and fewer than 20 percent of households use the internet at broadband speeds.

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Only 25 of the existing 423 Appalachian counties meet or exceed the national average for broadband speeds – and all were in metropolitan areas. Given the unreliable nature of FCC broadband maps, Appalachia’s digital divide is likely worse than measurements indicate.

Martinsville, Virginia has technically owned a municipal fiber network for the better part of a generation. But the city never had the time, resources, or interest in maximizing the Municipal Internet Network’s (MINet) full potential until COVID demonstrated the importance of affordable access and federal broadband grants made expansion a viable reality.

At a Martinsville city council meeting on February 13, the council offered unanimous support for a phased expansion of the city’s fiber network.

What exactly the expansion will look like, and how it will be funded, very much remain a work in progress.

The core MINet fiber network originally consisted of 48 strands and 20 miles of fiber connecting city schools, municipal buildings, local businesses, and key anchor institutions. A 2009 estimate indicates the network has saved the city between $100,000 and $150,000 annually on telecom lease agreements every year since its inception.

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Despite having been first constructed in the 1990s, Martinsville’s MINet only has about 376 customers (98 of them being residential) in a city of nearly 14,000 residents. There’s roughly 20 users currently on a multi-month waiting list, eager to get access to affordable fiber at speeds up to a gigabit per second (Gbps).

Mike Scaffidi has been the MINet director for 26 years. He tells ILSR that while the city has contemplated network expansion for a long time, the city never had the staff or resources to prioritize the expansion or marketing of the city-owned fiber network.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently announced it has created a “programmatic waiver” that offers alternatives to the much-criticized letter-of-credit (LOC) requirement buried in the BEAD program.

The announcement comes after hearing from a coalition of public interest groups and a chorus of broadband experts that the LOC requirement would effectively shut out smaller ISPs from participating in the national effort to expand high-speed Internet access.

When the bipartisan infrastructure law was passed in 2021, establishing the $42.5 billion BEAD program, the NTIA issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that detailed the spending rules for BEAD grants. Designed to ensure Internet service providers (ISPs) did not take federal grant dollars and leave a project incomplete, the LOC requires BEAD grant applicants to provide a letter-of-credit from a bank that verifies the applicant has at least 25% of the grant dollar amount in cash reserves held in a bank account for the entire time it takes to complete a network build.

A massive coalition of more than 300 broadband policy experts and organizations have written a letter to the U.S. government, warning that smaller broadband providers, nonprofits, and municipalities will be elbowed out of an historic $42.45 billion broadband grant program without some notable changes to program rules.

At the heart of their concerns sits the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, made possible by the recently passed infrastructure bill, and administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The grant program is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put a significant dent in America’s longstanding digital divide.

But BEAD program rules currently require grant recipients to obtain a letter of credit (LOC) from a bank, collateralized by cash or cash-equivalent. They also require grant winners to provide "matching funds of not less than 25 percent of project costs," though the latter restriction can be waived in some high deployment cost areas.

While the restrictions were intended to reduce the risk of project failure (a touchy subject for the government in the wake of problems with the FCC’s RDOF program), they require grant recipients to lock away vast and untouchable sums of capital for the duration of any broadband build, most of which last several years.

According to the coalition’s letter to lawmakers, such requirements present unnecessary obstacles for smaller ISPs and cash-strapped municipalities, undermining the infrastructure bill’s goal of equitable, affordable broadband for all.

Each year since its creation in 2017, the Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) has convened those working on the frontlines of Tribal connectivity. It brings together decision makers and stakeholders to build support for digital sovereignty and quality, affordable connectivity for Indigenous communities. 

With less than 60 percent of those living on Tribal lands in the lower 48 states having access to basic broadband connections – as Native Nations have regularly been excluded from policy conversations around these issues – ICS has become an important voice as the federal government is finally investing billions of dollars to expand high-speed Internet access across Indian Country.

The Summit, held this year in Anchorage, Alaska, was hosted by the Indigenous Connectivity Institute, an affiliate of Connect Humanity, an organization that supports underserved communities’ pursuit of better Internet access and enhancing digital skills. The Summit has become the most prominent event of its type in North America.

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Summit participants don’t just convene and talk. They also agree on a series of calls-to-action for governments and other entities with an eye on promoting digital equity in Indigenous communities. Last year’s calls to action, which included messaging around inclusive Tribal consultation, government and industry accountability, Indigenous spectrum rights, and workforce development, served as the foundation for this year’s focus.

As a young woman of the Nuxalk Nation, Mallory Hans is “clearing a path for future generations.”

A 2022 graduate of the British Columbia Institute of Technology, she’s one of about 50 people hailing from various Tribes and First Nations across North America in attendance for the latest Tribal Broadband Bootcamp, a three-day intensive learning experience focused on building and running Tribal Internet networks.

Held in different tribal regions several times a year since the initiative began in 2021, this bootcamp (the eighth in an ongoing series of hands-on seminars) is being hosted at the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino Resort on the Saint Regis Mohawk reservation along the New York/Canada border.

“So far so good,” Mallory said on Day Two of the bootcamp just as the attendees broke into small groups to go through a variety of demonstration stations set up by bootcamp instructors and Tribal employees who run Mohawk Networks, which provides fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) Internet, video, and voice services across the reservation in northern New York.

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In continuing the driving impulse to demystify technologies and build capacity among cohorts in Tribal nations, Day Two was centered around fiber stations that included demonstrations of how network operation centers are run; one on fiber splicing; another showcasing equipment used to install fiber inside of households with representatives from Calix, and another station on the electronic equipment that measures the performance of fiber lines.

“I’m enjoying it, feeling more confident and finding out I’m capable,” said the 22 year-old, newly minted fiber technician.

In this week’s round-up of broadband news, we culled three stories we think are worth reading.

How Much is Fast Enough?

The first is a story from Ars Technica – FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore – written by veteran IT reporter Jon Brodkin.

For years now, broadband-for-all advocates have lamented the FCC’s minimum broadband speed standard of 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload as being laughably antiquated. Indeed, it’s been almost three years since we made the case for Why 25/3 Broadband Is Not Sufficient, though it was outdated long before then.

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But as Brodkin reported this week, the FCC’s minimum speed standard “could finally change under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who is proposing a fixed broadband standard of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads along with a goal of bringing affordable service at those speeds to all Americans.”

Under Rosenworcel’s plan, the FCC would look at availability, speeds, and prices to determine whether the agency should take regulatory actions under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which requires the FCC to determine if high-speed Internet access is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.

Now that there’s broad consensus high-speed Internet connectivity should be universally accessible, there’s no shortage of broadband news/content floating around out there.

There’s the wheat (more truthful, useful, and informative stuff); the chafe (a mundane grain of truth buried under a steaming pile of bs), and a vast spectrum of perspectives in between.

In this new space we will highlight insightful news stories, blog posts, podcasts, or videos we’ve come across over the past week or so – with an eye to separate the signal from the noise.

Downloading now …

What Happened to Gigi?

While the FCC has been defanged in many ways, the agency is still at the center of our shared telecommunication ecosystem. So when President Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to serve as the fifth and final commissioner to break the 2-2 partisan deadlock at the agency, numerous consumer and public interest groups were ecstatic. The nation’s telecommunication workers backed her nomination. She even had the respect and quiet support of a number of conservative lawmakers.

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But her nomination was sunk by a vicious smear campaign, which led her to withdraw herself from consideration in March.

At the Broadband Communities Summit in May she described the process both like being put in a “washing machine full of rocks” and going through “a 16 month proctology exam.”

Sometimes local coalitions can beat Goliath.

In July of 2022, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and several state lawmakers visited Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish to announce the community had secured a $4 million grant to build a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network in one of the most poorly connected parts of the state.

But, as we first reported here, the monopoly cable provider Sparklight (formerly known as Cable One) filed a challenge to the grant claiming the cable company already serves 2,856 homes there. Following Sparklight’s multi-state campaign to prevent competition in areas where the company operates, the challenge brought the project to a grinding halt, sparking Delta Interfaith to leap into action. With the help of allied organizations, the coalition was able to secure a major victory for community broadband in rural Louisiana.

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The Power of Community-based Coalitions