cweiss's blog

NTIA Broadband Program Supports Workforce Preparation Across the United States

“It’s been great seeing people come back and say, ‘I’ve been able to get a job,’ after we helped them with sprucing up their résumé and applying for jobs online.”  - PCC Staff Member, Las Vegas Urban League

“Without this computer lab, we would not be getting people the jobs that we’re getting them. It’s just a great thing.”  - Staff Member, Workforce West Virginia

Last week, President Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act aimed at creating a more flexible and responsive system of workforce development to meet the needs of employers looking to fill 21st century jobs. Ensuring U.S. workers are able to compete and succeed is a key priority at the U.S. Commerce Department. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker served on a task force with Vice President Biden that recently released a report looking at solutions for making the nation’s workforce and training system more job-driven, integrated and effective.

Blog authors: 
Laura Breedon, BTOP Program Director for Public Computing and Broadband Adoption

Faster Broadband, Reaching More

Access to high-speed Internet has become a necessity for communities and businesses, and the latest data from the National Broadband Map shows that broadband continues to be available to more Americans than ever.

Broadband drives economic growth and innovation – including advances in health care, education, and public safety. Since its launch in 2011, the National Broadband Map has been helping businesses and consumers access broadband by detailing where and what types of high-speed Internet services are available in their communities.

Considering wireline and wireless technologies together, the slowest broadband speeds are nearly ubiquitously available, and access to very fast broadband (over 100 Mbps) has now reached two-thirds of Americans. The data, as of December 31, 2013, shows that 99 percent of Americans have access to wired and/or wireless broadband at advertised speeds of 6 Mbps downstream and 1.5 Mbps up, though this number drops to 89 percent when considering wireline broadband alone.

Blog authors: 
Anne Neville, Director, State Broadband Initiative

Bringing Broadband to Schools in Rural Michigan

President Obama’s ConnectED proposal aims to bring next-generation broadband, with speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and high-speed wireless, to K-12 schools across the nation.

Nowhere is the need greater – or the challenge tougher – than in rural America. High-speed Internet connections can give students living in remote communities access to classes, teachers and instructional materials that those in urban regions may take for granted. But with so many rural areas still lacking advanced telecommunications infrastructure, schools in these places often remain cut off from the promise of broadband.

In Michigan, a non-profit broadband provider called Merit Network is tackling this challenge by connecting K-12 districts in some of the most far-flung reaches of the state.


Installing fiber.
Installing fiber.


Merit, which owns and operates a statewide research and education network, dates back to the early academic and government networks that evolved into today’s Internet. It was established in 1966 by the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University.

Today, Merit is using more than $100 million in federal funding from NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program to install more than 2,000 miles of fiber to expand its network across the rural stretches of the state’s northern Lower Peninsula and the remote, economically distressed Upper Peninsula. Before the NTIA investment, “there wasn’t a whole lot of infrastructure” in the region, says Jason Russell, Merit’s member relations director.

Blog authors: 
Anthony Wilhelm, Associate Administrator of NTIA’s Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications

Broadband Construction Season

While stuck in construction traffic the other day, I thought of the old cliché that there are only two seasons – winter and road construction. But after visiting the Central Valley Independent Network’s (CVIN) offices in Fresno, California this summer, I would add broadband construction as a third season.

For CVIN and all other Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) projects, summer is a time to build. Whether it’s hanging fiber on utility poles or trenching, plowing, and drilling underground, our awardees and their construction crews are busy at work.

Broadband is a world of extremes: it takes heavy-duty, 10-ton equipment to install fiber strands that are as small as a human hair. It takes months and years of hot, sweaty, dust-filled workdays to build a network that will provide massive amounts of data to end users at speeds measured in millionths of a second. It takes hundreds of man-hours, at a pace of 1000 feet per day to install the fiber that will connect our schools and hospitals with resources on the other side of the planet with just the click of a mouse.
As a Federal Program Officer overseeing a number of our BTOP projects, I’m constantly collecting numbers that gauge progress from my awardees: miles of fiber and conduit installed; crews in the field; targets and milestones for connecting community anchor institutions (CAIs) and so-called last mile service providers – all with an eye toward completing the projects on time and on budget. Despite the weekly conference calls, quarterly and annual reporting, and internal analysis at the program office, there’s just no substitute to getting out in the field to understand exactly what our awardees’ crews experience on a daily basis.

Blog authors: 
Max Fainberg