Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
California Awards $86 million in Federal Funding Account Grants, Community Broadband Projects Big Winners
Imperial, Lassen, and Plumas Counties are among the first recipients of California’s $2 billion Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program (FFA). The cities of Oakland, Fremont, and San Francisco have also been awarded significant state awards.
The FAA grants are part of California’s ambitious Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at dramatically boosting broadband competition and access across the Golden State.
All told, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) awarded 11 FFA grants totaling over $86.6 million. Prominent awardees from this first round include publicly-owned broadband projects: the Golden State Connect Authority (GSCA) – a joint-powers broadband authority comprising 40 rural California counties – and Plumas Sierra Telecommunications for projects across Imperial, Lassen, and Plumas Counties.
“These projects will build community-based, future-proof, and equity-focused broadband infrastructure across California,” said CPUC President Alice Reynolds. “The Federal Funding Account – and these projects – are a shining example of our state’s Broadband For All values and objectives.”
According to the CPUC’s approved resolution, the GSCA will be receiving $13.8 million to help fund a fiber project that will bring symmetrical 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) capable fiber to 1,872 unserved locations and 5,622 unserved residents in Imperial County. The state grant will cover about 61 percent of the $22.8 million project cost.
“The balance of the project costs will be via private investment through the issuance of bonds by GSCA,” Rural County Representatives of California Chief Economic Development Officer Barbara Hayes told ILSR.
The GSCA notes that the deployments will primarily be built around the towns of Calipatria, Niland, Ocotillo, and Seeley where 82 percent of the unserved locations in the project area are designated as Disadvantaged Communities. Additionally, the GSCA has committed to maintaining set prices for at least 10 years.
“We anticipate construction commencement in early 2025. We will initially offer speeds up to 10 Gbps symmetrical,” Hayes said, adding locals should get a symmetrical 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) option for $70 a month, with costs hopefully further reduced by any future ACP-like discount replacements.
The CPUC also awarded regional cooperative Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications a $14.5 million grant to expand fiber access to 764 unserved locations and 1,476 unserved local residents in Lassen County, as well as a separate $15.7 million award to deploy fiber to 834 unserved locations and 1,169 unserved residents across Plumas County.
Oakland ($14,026,946), Fremont($7,690,056), the City and County of San Francisco ($10,393,500), and Plumas Sierra Telecom ($12,315,278) also received awards for projects spread across the counties of Alameda, San Francisco, and Sierra. An additional round of awards – including a $7 million grant for a GSCA open access fiber network in Alpine county – are expected to be announced on August 1.
“With broadband access now a necessity—much like electricity in the early 1900’s—the award of Federal Funding Account grant funds will allow Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications to continue to bridge the digital divide in these rural areas that would otherwise remain unserved due to the high cost of fiber-optic cable construction in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California,” Jeff Blagg, Right-of-Way Engineer for Plumas Sierra Telecommunications and Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative, said of the latest awards.
Many of these impacted regions either see no broadband at all or are vastly underserved by regional telecom monopolies with little competitive incentive to expand or improve service. In many markets, users will not only be seeing gigabit-capable fiber for the first time, they’ll be receiving it at affordable price points often not even seen in many major urban markets.
All Part Of A Much Bigger Plan
California’s Broadband For All plan was born in 2021 thanks to Senate Bill 156.
Not only did SB156 include $2 billion for last mile broadband deployments, it included $3 billion to help construct a new middle mile network intended to dramatically boost broadband access in the state dubbed the Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative (MMBI).
The MMBI helps extend fiber access deeper into unserved and underserved areas of California, making it cheaper to build out last mile service – like the efforts in Alpine county – to connect to the broader Internet backbone.
The state’s Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative (MMBI) is being managed by the California Department Of Technology (CDT), which maintains an interactive map documenting the progress of the planned deployment of what was originally slated to be more than 10,000 miles of fiber (updated over the summer to roughly 8,300 miles).
Both components of California’s plan will be funded by Coronavirus relief funds, federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) subsidies, and California State Government grants.
All related projects are slated to be finished by December 2026 as per federal funding rules.
The CPUC is clear that it couldn’t get anywhere close to funding the full amount of potential applications. Since the initial round of applications closed in September 2023, the CPUC says it received and reviewed 484 grant applications from every county in the state, totaling more than $4.6 billion in requests.
Lingering Worries About Equity And Implementation
While California’s ambitious broadband plan is well intentioned and has potential to be utterly transformative for affordable broadband access, there are ongoing concerns by digital equity advocates about some aspects of project implementation.
Those concerns were brought to a head last year, when CDT officials quietly announced they’d made significant cuts to the state’s affordable broadband expansion plan.
Blaming inflation and rising construction costs, the state’s renewed budget called for a 17 percent reduction in planned broadband investment, on average, across the state. The state, or its advisors, may have been overly ambitious in the initial announcements of where networks would be deployed.
But civil rights groups and equity activists told ISLR that most of the cuts predominately impacted marginalized communities of color, with many major decisions to broadband maps and deployment goals made without any sort of transparent and meaningful public input.
The U.S. broadband market has long been plagued by “digital discrimination,” or the act of selectively avoiding low-income or minority and poor communities when determining broadband expansion. Organizations like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) have documented the problem in U.S. cities from coast to coast.
In California, the California Alliance for Digital Equity (CADE) is leading the advocacy charge to address digital discrimination in the Golden State, throwing its support behind Assembly Bill 2239 – a measure to combat digital discrimination modeled on the anti digital discrimination rules the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) adopted last year.
The bill has passed through the California State Assembly and is quickly making its way through the state Senate. Advocates are now gearing up for a bill hearing before it goes to the Senate Floor for a vote, and then heads to the Governor’s desk.
CADE advocates say the California digital discrimination bill is groundbreaking civil rights law, as it focuses on using a “disparate impact” standard.
If passed, California would be the first state in the nation to enact such a measure, though the odds of the bill passing are uncertain given fierce opposition from the Big Telecom monopolies who oppose the legislation.
They are also hoping the FCC’s rules will be overturned on the federal level in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversal of decades-old “Chevron deference.”
As digital equity advocates push for legislation aimed at curbing digital discrimination, still others have expressed concerns that if too much of the historic state funding goes to entrenched monopolies, they’ll simply double down on all their worst impulses.
Or, as California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner recently told LAist, if the lion’s share of grant funds goes to entrenched regional monopolies that refuse to connect to California’s new middle mile network, “it will not lower Internet prices in California.”
LAist found that of the 484 applications for $4.6 billion in grant funding, 73 percent were from giant telecoms (with long histories of anti-competitive behavior) like AT&T and Spectrum. Meanwhile, just 22 percent of grant applicants have committed to using the state's open-access network to service California residents.
California’s ambitious broadband plan was supposed to disrupt the status quo, not enforce it. The hope is that transparency and public input take greater priority as the state begins integrating more than $1.86 billion in BEAD funding made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill.
For communities that simply would have never been connected to affordable fiber without state and federal assistance, the program should still hopefully prove transformative – warts and all.
Header image of the Tobin Bridges in Plumas County courtesy of Frank Schulenburg, ATTRIBUTION-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
Inline image of downtown Calipatria CA courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, ATTRIBUTION-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
Inline map of California's Middle Middle interactive map courtesy of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC)
Inline image of OaklandUndivided day of action courtesy of OaklandUndivided