IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

In 2018, Mississippi ranked near the bottom of the country in terms of broadband access. Today, evidence suggests a 2019 law could forever change the status quo of high-speed Internet in rural Mississippi.

Mississippi is now seeing how legislation can swing open the door for rural broadband expansion.

In January 2019, former Gov. Phil Bryant signed the Mississippi Broadband Enabling Act, removing a 1942 regulation that prevented electric cooperatives from offering anything other than electricity to their members.

Although the Connect America Fund has provided broadband access to more than 7 million users, more needs to be done to eliminate the digital divide.

Driving from Ely, Minn., to Duluth this week, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar suddenly lost cell service. How fitting that in addition to a book signing and other commitments and appointments, she was scheduled to chat with the News Tribune editorial board about the pressing need to expand high-speed broadband Internet service deeper into rural Minnesota.

Far beyond the convenience of a senator or anyone else being able to make a phone call, reliable broadband is becoming an increasingly critical need for farmers, rural business owners and others attempting to operate and compete globally. More and more, too, health care is going high-tech, and broadband is needed to deliver quality care to areas outside of large cities.

The Federal Communications Commission has released a draft of a national broadband map and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is urging residents to look at it and give feedback to improve its accuracy.

The FCC released the draft last month and has sought feedback from the public to verify its accuracy before the map is finalized.

The three-year plan will bring affordable statewide broadband service and give the state a competitive edge in education, health care and industry.

On Monday, Aug. 31, Kentucky leaders kicked off their plans to roll out broadband Internet service throughout the state as part of a three-year public-private partnership.

Implementing the KentuckyWired I-Way broadband project is slated to cost the state and its private-sector partners an estimated $324 million in coming years, but officials are willing to pay the price to bring the state up to connectivity snuff and increase its competitive edge.

Many have argued that the USF, which has supported affordable telephone services in high-cost areas since the mid-1990s, should be updated to drive the expansion of broadband and mobile communications. Furthermore, the ICC system, the mechanism that compensates carriers when they use one another’s networks, has been called inefficient in today’s market. Why? Because it was developed for a competitive landscape that was based on traditional telephony, presenting greater incentive for providers to offer voice service in rural and insulated communities than mobile and broadband.

For veterans, it's the ability to receive better health care while for deployed soldiers, its the chance to Skype with their two-year-old child.

Now, imagine not having that access.

In Alabama, which has the largest per-capita National Guard organization in the nation, the lack of broadband access among military families hits home.

Medical consultations with physicians across the state, or across the country; ready access to electronic medical records; decreases in expensive and often redundant testing; opportunities for telemedicine; robust research and medical innovation - These are part of the future of healthcare, and all depend on an affordable high speed, high capacity broadband infrastructure.

Today, Rhode Island’s health care community marked a milestone in the installation of that infrastructure, with the CharterCARE Health System lighting of the new Beacon 2.0 fiber optic network. CharterCARE is the first health care system to light the new high capacity fiber network.

For Winthrop, the idea to launch a community broadband network was hatched four years ago at a city council meeting. While the city has made progress, obstacles have cropped up, preventing the project from breaking ground. Problems range from private provider opposition to municipal partners dropping out of the project.

Four months after he faced a grilling at the New Orleans City Council, a central figure in the controversial “smart city” broadband plan has left Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration.

Jonathan Rhodes, the former director of the Mayor’s Office of Utilities, had his last day at City Hall on Friday, according to an automatic response from his email address.

The city, which did not respond to a request for comment, told The Lens that he had resigned.

Several Massachusetts municipalities have joined together to fund and deploy a broadband collective called WiredWest. WiredWest will provide gigabit internet to 22 towns.

The towns are primarily in Western Massachusetts.

Pricing will start at $49 per month for 25Mbps speeds with no caps. Other pricing tiers include 100mbps and gigabit service at higher price points.

It's all part of MassBroadband 123, a $71.6 million-project aimed at bringing high-speed Internet to 120 communities in Western and North Central Massachusetts, said Judith A. Dumont, director of the Massachusetts Broadband Institute.

The project is being funded with $45.4 million in federal stimulus funds received in July 2010 and $26.2 million in state funding.

If the Legislature votes to make the funding available before the end of May, an additional 20,000 to 30,000 homes and businesses are expected to gain connectivity.

In 2016, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton wants to triple the state's past broadband efforts.

When Dayton commented on the state's $1.87 billion budget surplus, he recommended that Minnesota allocate $100 million in grant funding for rural broadband development. If that funding is approved by the state Legislature this spring, the current grant program would require applicants to at least match the funding offered, which means the state may soon see a total of $200 million in rural broadband funding.

The percentage of households that have "broadband" available to them has inched up from 96.6 percent in January to 97.1 percent now, according to Connect Minnesota, the organization charged with providing the best data on the subject. That means the number of households pretty much forced to deal with dial-up service or satellite wireless is down to 61,000.

Lawmakers adopted goals for broadband access and speeds for the state last year. The first called for all households to have access to download speeds of at least 10 megabits per second by 2015, which the report claims is fast enough for simple telecommuting but not enough for telemedicine, broadcasting high-definition video and complex gaming.

Put simply, the term "broadband" refers to a high-speed connection to the Internet. But the answer to the question doesn't stay simple.

First, there are a number of technologies that can provide this connection. The main ones are DSL over copper phone lines, cable service over coaxial cable, fiber optic cable and wireless signals coming from fixed towers or from satellites. Each of these has its own characteristics involving price, area of coverage and technology constraints.

And second, the definition of what is high-speed is changing regularly. Late in 2010, for example, the Federal Communications Commission officially raised the speed that it considers broadband, overnight expanding the geographic areas that are considered unserved. Dial-up service, still some people's choice, is not considered broadband service.

Minnesotans know how important infrastructure like roads and bridges are to our economic growth and ability to move goods. Broadband is a critical component of the infrastructure of the 21st century, and it should be a priority at national, state and local levels.

More than ever, access to knowledge in our global marketplace contributes to our local economy, educational competitiveness and community success.

It's part of a $260,000 broadband service grant.

The grant awarded in Dexter will help 11 rural Missouri healthcare providers upgrade and improve electronic connections safely and securely to other medical providers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals told the Federal Communications Commission it was overstepping its powers in allowing municipalities to ignore state laws prohibiting public broadband rollouts.

On Aug. 10, a federal appellate court ruled against a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plan that would have allowed municipalities to build their own broadband networks, despite state laws explicitly prohibiting such buildouts. Such laws limiting government entry into the commercial broadband market exist in varying forms across 19 states. The ruling is seen by many broadband advocates as a blow to the vision of a future broadband market brimming with competition, and that provides cheap and equal access.

The promise of a national system is in the limelight once again, just shy of the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, which brought into tragic focus that police officers and firefighters from various jurisdictions were unable to communicate with one another as they responded to the attacks at the Pentagon and the felled World Trade Center. The same problem was demonstrated again in 2005 in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the Gulf Coast.

According to a National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announcement, at least 60 percent of homes don’t have landline telephone service, wireless signals are spotty or non-existent, and the 911 system often cannot track the location of callers. Access to wireline broadband Internet access has been available to less than 4 percent of the population. But now The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority ((NTUA) is rolling out a wireless communications system with a $32 million NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant.