You might not have made it to Mesa for the Digital Southwest Regional Broadband Summit, but you can now watch some of the speakers and panel conversations. Next Century Cities has posted video from panel conversations and the keynote address from Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.

In her address, Commissioner Clyburn said:

“Access to high-speed broadband is a necessity in today’s 21st century economy, providing a gateway to jobs, education, and healthcare. I am honored to join state and local leaders who are on the front lines of closing the digital and opportunities divide. Working together, we can achieve our shared goal of affordable broadband for all Americans.”

The Commissioner’s full remarks were about 18 minutes long:

Sharing Knowledge on Infrastructure 

Christopher moderated Panel Two, focused on infrastructure needs, which included CISSP President and CTO of CityLink Telecommunications John Brown, Partner at Conexon Jonathan Chambers, Director of Technology at the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association Matt Rantanen, Manager of Tribal Critical Infrastructure at Amerind Riskand Kimball Sekaquaptewa, and Vice President of Digital Innovation at Magellan Advisors Jory Wolf. If you listen to the Community Broadband Bits podcast, you’ll probably recognize most of these voices.

The video lasts one hour thirteen minutes:

The other videos are available on the Next Century Cities YouTube channel page, or watch them here.

Welcome and Introduction: Deb Socia, Executive Director of Next Century Cities and Eric Farkas, Fujitsu Network Communications, 7:32

Net Inclusion 2017 from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and hosted by the St. Paul Public Library is less than a month away. The event will be on May 16 - 17 in Minnesota and early bird registration prices are available to April 20th.

From the event website:

Participants will discuss current and potential local, state and federal policies and policy innovations that could increase digital equity, current and potential sources of financial and programmatic support of digital inclusion programs, and share digital inclusion best practices and new strategies from across the USA.

Maya Wiley, Senior Vice President for Social Justice and the Henry Cohen Professor of Urban Policy and Management at the New School will present the Keynote address. Read more about her work here.

The event will start on Tuesday, May 16th, with tours of local inclusion programs and lunch at the historic James J. Hill Center. Participants will then move to the St. Paul Central Library and City Hall for the Break-out Sessions. The Charles Benton Digital Equity Champion Award will be presented on Wednesday along with some other special discussions on local government investment and the digital divide.

Christopher will be speaking on Tuesday at the 2:45 p.m. “Statehouse strategies: State-level digital inclusion advocacy and programs” panel. Other familiar speakers include:

• Chris Lewis, Public Knowlege
• Joanne Hovis, CTC
• Laura Breeden, NDIA
• Nicol Turner-Lee, Brookings Institution
• Bernadine Joselyn, Blandin Foundation
• Matt Wood, FreePress

…and many others.

In addition to speakers from national organizations, the agenda includes quite a few participants from St. Paul and Minnesota groups working toward digital literacy and finding ways to bridge the digital divide.

A new report from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community concludes that the telecom giant AT&T has redlined low-income neighborhoods in Cleveland. The company has cherry-picked higher-income neighborhoods for new technology investments and skipped over neighborhoods with high-proverty rates.

AT&T’s Digital Redlining, uses publicly available data from the FCC and the American Community Survey to expose how AT&T has failed to invest in low-income communities in Cleveland.

See With Your Own Eyes

Read the report and explore the interactive maps on digitalinclusion.org. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community spent six months uncovering how AT&T has systematically passed over communities with high poverty rates. The five maps paint a stark picture of the digital divide. 

The extent of AT&T’s failure only came to light after the AT&T and DirecTV merger. As part of the merger, AT&T had to create an affordable Internet access program for low-income residents. The lowest speed tier in the program was 3 Megabits per second (Mbps) download for $5, but many low-income communities in Cleveland were considered ineligible; infrastructure in their communities only allowed access to speeds that maxed out at about 1.5 Mbps download. (Read more in "AT&T Gets Snagged in Giant Loophole Attempting to Avoid Merger Responsibility")

Public Data Can Share Some Insights 

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community noticed a pattern and began investigating. The FCC Form 477 data used in the report provides maximum speeds and technology by each census block, which typically overstates the quality of service actually available to households.

Residents and businesses in rural regions between Reno and Las Vegas recently learned that their odds at obtaining high-quality Internet access just went through the roof. A collaboration between county owned Churchill County Communications (CC Communications), the Valley Communications Association of Pahrump (VCA), and Switch technology company to deploy a middle mile fiber-optic backbone will open up a range of possibilities for rural communities along the U.S. Highway 95. The route runs north and south along Nevada's far west, passing through a number of small towns that are welcoming the new alliance.

A Backbone Running North And South

For the past 11 months, CC Communications and the VCA have been working to deploy more than 450 miles of fiber from north to south. Switch provided funding for the deployment to link its data centers in Las Vegas and the Tahoe-Reno area and will also provide funding for expansion to some rural communities. VCA will service the network in the south and Churchill will care for the north section.

Along the backbone, CC Communications and VCA will connect local communities. Beatty, in southern Nevada, plans to be the first use the new infrastructure and to deploy fiber in the community. The unincorporated community is home to about 1,000 people and is about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas. According to Valley Electric Association, the rural electric cooperative that owns and operates VCA, they have plans to expand fiber throughout the Beatty community.

“With that backbone, you can link up any town anywhere near it,” said Michael Hengel, spokesman for the Valley Electric Association. “The first all-fiber community in Nevada will be Beatty.”

Depending on where you live, there may be more opportunities these days to participate in marches, demonstrations, or community political meetings. Regardless of whether your beliefs lean red or blue, you may be like many other Americans and wonder what the future holds for federal telecommunications policy. Saul Tannenbaum from Cambridge recently wrote a piece that stressed the importance of local decision making authority and how municipal networks can rise above reversals anticipated by the new administration’s FCC.

Tannenbaum looks at four policies that are likely to be or have been adjusted from current practice to a new approach under the Trump administration:

• Digital Inclusion
• Network Neutrality
• Corporate Consolidation
• Privacy

Cambridge has considered developing in its own municipal network for a while and Tannenbaum connects the dots between the investment and local control over these issues. While he describes the situation in his own community, it can apply to many other places on the map; he reminds us that decisions about connectivity can and should be local.

While telecommunication policy is thought of as national, in reality, it’s a matter of whose cables and services reach which home. That decision can be a very local one. A free, fair, open, and affordable Internet for Cambridge is within grasp. All Cambridge needs to do is build one.

By building its own network, Cambridge can ensure that its infrastructure reflects its values and the needs of its residents, not the values and needs of Comcast and Verizon.

Check out the full article, Municipal Broadband Is Municipal Resistance, on Medium.

Next Century Cities and Google Fiber are taking applications for the 2017 Digital Inclusion Leadership Awards. The deadline is Friday, February 10, 2017.

From the award announcement:

Next Century Cities and Google Fiber have announced the judges for the 2017 Digital Inclusion Leadership Awards, which will celebrate cities and counties tackling barriers to internet adoption. 

There are two categories:

• Leader in Digital Inclusion Best Practices: for existing programs with over a year of work in addressing the digital divide.
• Most Promising New Plan: for particularly promising new programs for ensuring digital inclusion in a community.

At the award website you can review the list of expert judges, submit your questions, and review FAQs about the awards and the process. You can also watch the recorded webinar from December. Don’t forget to apply by next Friday, February 10, 2017

In December 2016, the Free Press released the extensive report Digital Denied: The Impact of Systemic Racial Discrimination on Home-Internet Adoption. In the 225-page document, Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner dove into the numbers on race and the digital divide

The report provides a qualitative analysis of the digital divide's disproportionate impact people of color. Turner provides a number of policy solutions addressing both home Internet access and mobile Internet access.

Home Internet Adoption: A Continuing Divide

The digital divide refers to the gap between those who have access to information technologies and those who do not. Analyzing both U.S. Census Bureau data and FCC deployment data, Turner found that:

While 81 percent of Whites and 83 percent of Asians have home internet (counting wired and wireless subscriptions alike as “home” access), only 70 percent of Hispanics, 68 percent of Blacks, 72 percent of American Indian/Alaska Natives, and 68 percent of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders are connected at home.

Even after accounting for differences in income, education, age, geography, and job status, communities of color have not adopted high-speed Internet services at the same rate as White folks. There remained a gap of six to eight percent between Hispanic, Black, or Native American households and White households.

Mobile-Internet Adoption: Model for Possible Solutions

Turner, however, noted that mobile Internet adoption did not sustain this same rate of digital divide. In some cases, low-income households of color have equal or higher levels of adoption than low-income White households. Explaining the difference between the adoption rates for home Internet service and mobile Internet service, Turner credited the wireless marketplace’s competitive prices and the prepaid or resold services offered.

In December 2016, the Congressional Research Service office released two reports on federal funding programs to improve high-speed Internet access. One report focuses on Tribal lands, and the other report provides an overview of the digital divide in general.

Dollars for the Digital Divide

Researchers Lennard G. Kruger and Angele A. Gilroy collaborated on Broadband Internet Access and the Digital Divide: Federal Assistance Programs. Kruger is a specialist in Science and Technology Policy and Gilroy is a specialist in Telecommunications Policy. The report provides an overview of ongoing efforts, including recently enacted legislation.

Kruger and Gilroy define the digital divide as between those who have access and those who do not. In particular, they focus on the dynamic between urban and rural areas, especially with regard to different income levels. The researchers consolidate previously released information on the digital divide and provide an analysis of current programs, including grants through the Appalachian Regional Commission. The researchers conclude by detailing all recent legislation. Check out the report for more information.

Status of Tribal Broadband

Kruger also wrote Tribal Broadband: Status of Deployment and Federal Funding Programs. This report follows up the Government Accountability Office’s 2016 report, Additional Coordination and Performance Measurement Needed for High-Speed Internet Access Programs on Tribal Lands. 

Drawing on information from both the GAO’s report and the FCC 2016 Broadband Progress Report, Kruger relays key facts about Internet access and federal funding. In particular, Kruger notes in the report that there is no dedicated federal funding earmarked to improving Internet access on Tribal lands:

Tune in to the Grow2Gig+ webinar from the Schools, Health, & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) on Tuesday, January 10, 2017. The topic will be "Partnerships and Rural Broadband Needs" and our Christopher Mitchell will moderate the discussion. The hour-long event starts at 11 a.m. EST.

Christopher will offer information on steps local communities can take to bridge the digital divide. Joanne Hovis, President of CTC Technology & Energy, will address some of the challenges found in rural areas. SHLB Executive Director John Windhausen will spend some time on the potential role of public-private partnerships. John will discuss partnerships as envisioned by SHLB in its American Broadband Connectivity (ABC) Proposal for the Trump Administration. You can follow the discussion with #Grow2Gig and #RuralBB.

The webinar and is free and open to the public. It’s the second in the Grow2Gig+ webinar series. You can register online for the webinar and check out the other events on deck at the SHLB website.