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There will be no Broadband Advisory Board meeting for December. The Board wishes everyone a wonderful holiday season and looks forward to kicking off another year of coordination and collaboration on Jan. 18 at 11 a.m. MST. Additionally, next year the Board will begin meeting every other month on the third Tuesday of January, March, May and so on.
Additionally, Sarah Smith, Senior Project Manager for the CBO and Kate Sneed, Recovery Officer for OEDIT & the CBO, will host two listening sessions for a working group to generate a plan for the Coronavirus Capital Projects Funds (CPF) on Wednesday Jan. 5 at 1 p.m. MST and Tuesday, Jan. 11 at 2 p.m. MST. If you would like to participate, please send an email to sarah.smith@state.co.us.
The Colorado Broadband Office will not be hosting a Lunch & Learn Webinar in December. Catch up on November’s Lunch & Learn Webinar on Broadband and Education featuring Tim Miles and take a look back at all of the Lunch & Learn webinars from this year.
There will be no Broadband Advisory Board meeting for December. The Board wishes everyone a wonderful holiday season and looks forward to kicking off another year of coordination and collaboration on Jan. 18 at 11 a.m. MST. Additionally, next year the Board will begin meeting every other month on the third Tuesday of January, March, May and so on.
Additionally, Sarah Smith, Senior Project Manager for the CBO, and Kate Sneed, Recovery Officer for OEDIT & the CBO, will host two listening sessions for a working group to generate a plan for the Coronavirus Capital Projects Funds (CPF) on Wednesday Jan. 5 at 1 p.m. MST and Tuesday, Jan. 11 at 2 p.m. MST. If you would like to participate, please email sarah.smith@state.co.us.
The new “Critically Unserved” map layer is now available in the “Broadband Service Levels” section of the Broadband Board Toolkit map. This granular map layer is derived from our most recent Broadband Cycle data (Oct. 2021) and allows for the identification of areas within Colorado with reported broadband speeds of 13 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload or less. Speeds of this tier have been deemed “critically unserved” in HB21-1109.
Our Broadband Data Team will begin outreach efforts for the Spring 2022 Data Cycle in January. We collect broadband availability data from internet service providers (ISPs) in a biannual data collection cycle to show broadband availability across the state for the Colorado Broadband Map. Review the data submission process and guidelines here.
In December 2020, HB 20B-1001 appropriated $20 million from the general fund to award grants through the Connecting Colorado Students Grant (CCSG) Program to increase access to broadband services for students, educators and other staff who lack stable, reliable internet access for online learning. In November, the Colorado Department of Education submitted the CCSG Program Report to the Colorado General Assembly detailing the results of the program.
The funding was granted to 39 local education agencies (LEAs) for a variety of expenses, such as:
- Providing or purchasing home broadband connections or mobile hotspots for students, educators and other staff.
- Purchasing data plans for students, educators and other staff.
- Increasing the availability of internet access using Wi-Fi, antennas, mobile hotspots, satellite, connections or other technologies capable of delivering broadband service.
- Addressing broadband infrastructure needs in communities in which broadband services are significantly limited or unavailable.
According to current reporting (from 23 of the 39 LEAs), over 6,000 students, educators and staff have received access to the internet so far.
Written by Kate Sneed, State Economic Recovery Officer, OEDIT
Happy holidays! This month's update is focused on the ARPA capital projects funding for broadband. Colorado has completed the Capital Project Fund application and is awaiting our grant agreement from the Treasury. We hope to have that finalized in January in order to receive our administrative funds and begin the planning process. Sarah Smith will be hosting listening sessions in early January. Please reach out to her if you would like to participate.
 Many have started inquiring about the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant from IIJA. CBO and the state are still analyzing the legislation, grant programs and potential dollars for Colorado. We did learn that NTIA is not anticipating a Notice of Funding Opportunity until May 2022. Much more on IIJA and BEAD in upcoming newsletters.
We continue to monitor federal programs and highlight recent developments in this space. Please visit our website and follow us on Twitter for more updates on federal broadband news.
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