Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a funding opportunity for the Affordable Connectivity Outreach Grant Program and the process to challenge the FCC’s National Broadband Map.
Affordable Connectivity Outreach Grant Program
The FCC announced two separate notices of funding opportunities for the Affordable Connectivity Outreach Grant Program (ACP). The Affordable Connectivity Outreach Grant Program expands innovative outreach efforts to increase ACP awareness and enrollment specifically to reach historically unserved and underserved populations. The League wrote a blog post about this funding opportunity earlier this year. As a reminder, the application deadline is January 9.
FCC National Broadband Map: Challenge Process for Local Governments
On November 18, the FCC released the first iteration of the National Broadband Map. This map is an important tool that will impact targeted funding and other efforts to bring broadband to unserved and underserved communities. Therefore, the need for accurate data where broadband service is available and not available has never been of greater importance. Of note, the release of the map also kicks off the public fixed availability challenge process, which will play an important role in ensuring the map's data is accurate across local communities.
The League’s federal partner, the National League of Cities, wrote a blog post about submitting a challenge. A key data tool (dashboard) is linked in the blog where local leaders can look up their municipal data compared to other metrics specific to their individual community. NTIA announced the deadline to submit challenges to be incorporated into the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) allocations is January 13.
Contact: Paul Penna, Senior Legislative Analyst, ppenna@njlm.org, 609-695-3481, x110.