The State of Delaware will invest $110 million as it attempts to cover all Delawarians with high-speed, wireline broadband internet service, Governor John Carney announced on Thursday at a gathering in Bridgeville, DE. The broadband infrastructure investment – funded by the American Rescue Plan Act – aims to fill in the “broadband deserts” and make Delaware the first state to provide wireline broadband access to every Delaware home and business.
Currently, about 11,600 Delaware homes and businesses lack access to high-speed, wireline broadband service. The broadband infrastructure project announced on Thursday will target investments to areas currently unserved or underserved, lacking a wireline connection, and will prioritize projects that achieve “last mile” connections to households and businesses.
“There’s nothing more important than making sure that we are competitive for those businesses that might locate in our state and to enable our businesses here in our state to be successful,” Gov. Carney said. “When you think about the ingredients of that, broadband connectivity is a critical part of it.”
Comcast’s public private partnerships in the state of Delaware will lead to more than 300 homes getting access to broadband service with speeds up to 1.2 gigabits, according to Kevin Broadhurst, Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs, Comcast. Businesses will be able to get a full suite of products and services, including Ethernet network speeds up to 100 gigabits per second.
Comcast has sought to increase connectivity since the pandemic began opening more than 10,000 WiFi hotspots to the public. Additionally, since 2011, it has connected 84,000 Delawareans through its broadband adoption program for low income residents, which provides 60 days of free service.
“Just this week, [in Sussex County] we entered the operational phase for over 100 homes that are now going to be able to get access to broadband service, which previously did not have that. We are on track to activate more than 250 additional homes in the next couple of months, as a result of the partnership that we formed with the state,” Broadhurst said.
Working with CTC Technologies, the State of Delaware connected 25,700 students with broadband access as well as educators throughout Delaware, providing the ability to continue with remote learning from the home during the pandemic-related quarantine.
To know where further investments need to be made, the state developed a strategic plan to address broadband, which resulted in a map showing unserved households. “We have leveraged data that provides detailed information on the exact areas where investments need to be made, that is something that we did not have definitive detail on prior to going into 2020,” Delaware Chief Information Officer Jason Clarke said. “And once we’ve created that we now know exactly where we need to target, and we have developed a strategy that allows us to leverage our primary edge, our strategy where we are able to extend wired services to each and every one of these homes.”
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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