Florida Broadband Director Shares Update on State Connectivity

Last week, during the Florida Broadband Summit hosted by the Florida Department of Commerce and CareerSource Florida in Orlando, the state’s broadband director, Leo Garcia, shared a brief overview of Florida’s broadband expansion and connectivity efforts.

Garcia said the state has supported community facility upgrades, providing digital devices to those in need and key infrastructure investments. Regarding the latter, he said, “ConnectedFlorida has awarded over $700 million across four grant programs that we’re managing today” and has access to about $642 million in private leverage from vendors working with the state.

So far, the broadband office has invested these funds into 205 infrastructure projects, 29 community upgrade efforts and 15 digital connectivity awards.

“With the money we are managing, we’re helping over 500,000, and we expect to double that or get close to that with the [Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD)] dollars we’ll have here soon,” he said. ”We’re also expecting over 170,000 premises to still serve that are unserved or underserved, so that’s where our BEAD dollars and efforts will go for infrastructure.”

Other potential allocations — like BEAD program funds provided by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) — might also shift due to recent broadband challenge submissions. These submissions are used to identify locations eligible for BEAD funding within the state and to prevent public funds from being awarded to areas with Internet service.

“On Sept. 5, we received over 638 challenges, which came from 41 participants, totaling over 51,000 locations,” Garcia said. “Our data is what’s going to drive our way of managing and understanding with the BEAD dollars that we’re currently receiving.”

Below is a screenshot from the Florida Department of Commerce’s website detailing the state’s BEAD challenge process timeline:
“Once the rebuttal phase is complete, our office will begin to make those determinations and clean up that data to prepare that for the NTIA for review and approval,” Garcia said. “We’re trying to get that data as accurate as possible so we better understand what it is that we need to invest in moving forward.”