California was awarded over $1.8 billion in federal funding to expand access to affordable, high-speed internet in the state, U.S. senators Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla announced on Monday.
Approximately one in five Californians lacks access to reliable and affordable high-speed internet, Feinstein said in the announcement.
The funding comes out of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program, which is a federal grant program that aims to get all Americans online.
BEAD prioritizes areas and communities with Americans that have little to no Internet access.
In a speech on Monday, President Joe Biden stated that these communities include “rural communities like Appalachia – towns that Joe represents. It includes Tribal lands from Alaska to the Dakotas, coastal towns from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest. It also includes suburban communities, even cities, neighborhoods.”
California alone has received a total of more than $6.9 billion from the federal government to date for broadening access to broadband.
Wow..
1in 5? That’s perfectly acceptable. More wasting of our tax dollars.
Got to have everyone online so they can be controlled. No hiding out in the hills is acceptable. 😬
Affordable? please define.
Define high speed also.
Why is the democrat government in the internet business? Buying more votes?
I’m pretty sure that the 1 in 5 Californians who don’t have access are people who don’t want access and don’t care. Also, I had to chuckle at “affordable”. That will never happen.
I’m suspicious of the Federal Gov’t spending tax dollars to expand the NETWORK into ubiquity.
Motivation? Control. The links to the ‘net are private companies, and they stand to make more
$ at the expense of the taxpayers footing the bill. If it were profitable to run high-speed every-
where, it would be done already. Expensive.
What a crock. This is what happens when you are spending other people’s money. Do you have any idea how much 1.8 billion will line people’s pockets?
The democrat governments greatest skill is the taking of money from hard working citizens. Their second greatest skill is giving it away(in many ways and forms) to buy themselves votes, power, and financial gain.
Their third greatest skill is blaming others when their programs prove completely useless.
Their fourth greatest skill is conning the feds into repapering the empty bank account.
However, their greatest skill, the one that goes to the head of the class, is conning voters who don’t have time to do research.
THE F. S.
Excellent and very accurate points.
So how do they define “high speed internet”? it’s rural communities that have the problem and mostly people outlying from those. The small town I grew up in does have high speed broadband in the community but I don’t know how far it goes for the local farmers.
Ah , the joys of limited or NO internet access.
Democrats passed legislation to run up the debt to finance $550 billion with their infrastructure bill so now the money has to go somewhere. This broadband thing joins the money to expand BART into Silicon Valley. I can’t recall any legislation that actually benefits us ever taking effect so they might as well fund unicorn research and Bigfoot awareness kiosks.
It is called buying votes. How much will be kicked back to “the Big Guy”?
I’ll bet not one family who supports itself will get anything but a tax increase.
It all comes out of our own pockets anyway… who are they trying to kid? ….. I wonder how much of it will Newscum skim off the top for his own pet projects
Awarded $1.8 billion. That is what we hard workers sweat and toil for, so big daddy government can feel around in our pockets for any existing coin to take and “award” (or as appropriately stated above) buy votes. Won’t it be great when everyone in California has high speed internet, but no electricity with which to run things?
We have communities in the USA, including many in California, that do not have access to safe drinking water. Other communities are wrestling with pollution, including right here where some sort of white dust from one of the refineries is getting spreading around in the north part of CC county. Internet access should be far down the priority list.