Residents and state and local governments now have a new resource at hand as officials work to push high-speed Internet resources out to last mile and connect 40 million Californians.
The state has gone live with a new Broadband for All portal, the California Department of Technology announced Monday in Noteworthy, its area of online insights on CDT’s state government technology initiatives. The portal, CDT said in its news release, “supports the efforts called out in the 2020 Broadband Action Plan, that all Californians have access to affordable high-performance Internet, devices and training which are critical components of digital equity.”
It aggregates a variety of data on state broadband work, including the plan, the Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative, and the Last-Mile and Adoption Programs. Other features include planning resources for those developing or carrying out a broadband plan; information on funding opportunities for deployment, adoption and digital literacy; access to download CalSpeed, an Internet speed test tool; and access to the California Interactive Broadband Map, which enables residents to search information on broadband services. There’s also an action plan progress tracker following the state’s progress on goals in the Broadband for All Action Plan; and, on the site’s main page, information on future meetings for the Middle-Mile Advisory Committee and the California Broadband Council.
California allocated $3.25 billion in its 2021-2022 Fiscal Year state budget for “middle mile” and for building broadband lines; $2 billion for last-mile infrastructure and $1 billion each for rural and urban communities. One in five Californians are still without reliable broadband, a lack, CDT said, that pervades rural and urban areas but is “more often experienced by low-income, tribal and other historically marginalized communities.”
