Governor Ned Lamont yesterday announced that his administration’s plan to use $42.9 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to launch a program that will construct and deploy the necessary infrastructure to expand broadband internet service in underserved areas of Connecticut has received approval from the U.S. Treasury Department.
The Connecticut Broadband Infrastructure Program is designed to be a competitive grant program to support the goal of statewide universal access to affordable, resilient, and reliable internet service. Specifically, it will get homes and businesses connected to broadband internet in areas that have been identified as lacking the necessary infrastructure to support this service, with a focus on those in low-income communities. It will be administered by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Energy and Technology Policy and is anticipated to launch in early 2023.
The program’s initial target is to expand or improve broadband access for 10,000 households and businesses statewide. This includes access to symmetric upload and download speeds of at least 100 Mbps, while progressing towards a statewide goal of universal access to download speeds of 1 Gbps and upload speeds of 100 Mbps, and symmetric speeds of 1 Gbps for community anchor institutions. In addition to increasing access to broadband, the program will focus on improving the resiliency and reliability of these networks by prioritizing more robust topologies and methods of infrastructure deployment. This includes more resilient methods such as building infrastructure underground and designing failover traffic routes that direct traffic to a secondary resource when the primary resource is weakened.
Each internet service provider funded by the program will be required to participate in the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides low-income households $30 per month off their internet bills.
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