“Our residents really want to get broadband. They want to have reliable broadband. They want to have broadband that is affordable,” Tammie Weigl, director of Information Services and CIO for Santa Cruz County, Calif., said last week during a panel at the Connecting Communities Summit.
The panel, which included county officials like Weigl and Marina MacLatchie, California federal program officer at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), centered on the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program NTIA administers, considered part of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to close the national digital divide by funding broadband infrastructure projects in underserved and unserved communities. The effort has largely taken a route that favors fiber infrastructure, and officials are careful to articulate this is indeed the goal, given the quality and capabilities of fiber.
However, fiber can be expensive and difficult to deploy in rugged, rural, mountainous landscapes, where fixed wireless technology could be the pragmatic option.
“Each state has a math problem to solve, which is, you have your allocation — this is the amount of money you are getting — and you have to serve everyone,” MacLatchie said during the discussion, at the headquarters of Tarana Wireless.
“California has to look at their math problem. They have to look at the state and figure out, OK, where is the break point where we are maximizing fiber and maximizing fixed wireless, before moving to other types of technology? And that break point looks different in every state. And it means there’s going to be a different mix of percentages in every state,” she added.
In Santa Cruz County, home to mountains and redwoods, “the geography is very, very challenging,” said Weigl. A recent broadband plan for the county concluded it could cost up to $750 million to connect every home and business with high-speed Internet, all but requiring that the county consider a host of technologies.
There’s a priority for fiber, said Emilio Perez, chief consultant at the California State Assembly’s Committee on Communications and Conveyance, and panel moderator. “But currently, there’s a realization that probably with fiber, we’re not going to connect every household just because of the price. So wireless is allowed. And there’s a recognition that we need to use all the tools in the toolkit to be able to connect everybody.”
Wireless technologies like Tarana have “really changed the narrative around wireless,” said Jade Piros de Carvalho, vice president of broadband advocacy and partnerships with Bonfire Infrastructure Group in Denver and former director of the Kansas Office of Broadband Development.
Piros de Carvalho said she believes the best, highest technologies should be the ones provided, but this could include “next-generation fixed wireless.”
“There’s so many states, like Kansas, they don’t have enough funding. We’re going to have an extraordinary amount of wireless,” she said.
