The Central Coast Broadband Consortium, an organization made up of private companies, government agencies, educational institutions and nonprofits, will work toward bringing jobs to Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties by extending broadband Internet access with a three-year, $450,000 grant, a consortium member said today.
The $150,000 for the first year of the grant will go toward inventory efforts in which the consortium will inventory any existing infrastructure that will help with efforts to extend broadband service across the three counties, said Steve Blum, a consortium member who serves on the coordinating council.
"[We will] inventory things like fiber lines, but also wireless sites, conduits&hellippole lines, rights of way, existing microwave pads, and any kind of physical asset that can be leveraged to deploy broadband facilities," he said.
The second phase of the project will search for existing broadband policies in the 21 jurisdictions within the counties, and the third will work toward adoption, said Blum, who expects the consortium to start work on all three phases of the project this year.
The California Public Utilities Commission approved California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) Rural and Urban Broadband Consortia approved grants for the East Bay organization, along with seven other consortia across the state, on Dec. 1, 2011, according to a CPUC press release. The grants total more than $1.5 million across the seven groups, which were selected from 15 applications to the CPUC.
Increased broadband Internet access will improve the area’s economy, bringing jobs outside the hospitality and agriculture arena, Blum said.
"It’s important for our region for economic development purposes," he said. "We’re just over the hill from Silicon Valley but we might as well be on the other side of the planet in some regards."
