On November 15, 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law. This Act includes a historic investment of $65 billion to help close the digital divide and ensure that all Americans have access to reliable, high speed, and affordable broadband.
On March 9, 2022 NTIA kicked off a series of technical assistance webinars prior to the release of the Notice of Funding Opportunity for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act broadband programs. These webinars are designed to help prospective applicants and stakeholders understand these grant programs and assist applicants to prepare high quality applications. During these sessions, NTIA presented on:
- broadband technology and economics;
- engagement and partnerships; and
- enabling conditions to spur broadband deployment.
To accompany these webinars, NTIA has also developed the following short resources which provide a snapshot of key points on each of these topics:
- Broadband Network Deployment Engineering: This resource provides an overview of broadband deployment engineering and looks at network architecture, infrastructure elements, business models, and technologies.
- Economics of Broadband Networks: This resource provides an overview of the challenges of deploying broadband, the economics of networks and important considerations.
- Planning a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy: This is the first of two resources designed to help states and localities develop a stakeholder engagement strategy and focuses on identifying who should be engaged, processes and relationships that currently exist, and how the work will be done.
- Setting Up Initial Stakeholder Engagement: This is the second of two resources designed to help states and localities develop a stakeholder engagement strategy and focuses on objectives for each stakeholder that is engagement, various engagement approaches, and what to discuss.
- Broadband Policies & Mechanisms: This resource looks at right-of-way access, dig once for burial deployments, and pole attachment policies and one-touch make-ready for aerial deployments as policies that could reduce construction costs and accelerate project deployment.
- Broadband Asset Mapping & Management: This resource looks at the process of collecting, organizing, and tracking data on relevant infrastructure assets that can be utilized for broadband deployment.
Please register for our next scheduled Pre-NOFO Technical Assistance webinars on April 27 and May 11 and sign up to receive NTIA updates here.