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• Adopt digital equity programs
• Workforce development programs and vocational training
(Source: InternetForAll.gov)
As part of the BEAD Program’s initiatives, workforce development
is essential. Research by the Fiber Broadband Association estimates
that building and expanding the nation’s infrastructure for high-speed internet systems will create more than 200,000 jobs. Along with the increase in Information & Communications Technology (ICT) industry personnel, skilled labor in the heavy-construction work will be needed in the form of surveyors, laborers, foremen, safety personnel and more.
Like many states, Tennessee saw a need to improve its broadband internet capabilities long before the BEAD Program.
Turner recalls Tennessee 811 working with broadband providers in 2015, when a large-scale project was planned for the Nashville area. “We had heard horror stories about damage caused by similar projects in other states, and I felt that proactive communication could play a critical role in our efforts to help the provider efficiently install fiber while mitigating risk to incumbent utilities.” While Turner remembers highs and lows from that early broadband project, he is happy to say, “we avoided the serious incidents that occurred in other markets.”
That early project also helped plan how Tennessee 811 would handle similar projects – which Turner knew were coming to the state in the very near future. “We learned a lot about the priorities of a broadband provider; how to mesh those with the steps needed
to protect existing infrastructure; and what to expected from the members of the community that are impacted by the work.” He added, “Every project
is different, but what we learned then plays a role in how we address today’s broadband rollouts.” (See Steps to Safer, Smarter Digging, page xx.)
With the state seeing the need for high-speed internet access, Tennessee was among the many states forming broadband strategies prior to the federal BEAD Program. In 2017, more than four years before BEAD’s inclusion in the IIJA – which was signed in late- 2021, the Tennessee Legislature created
the Tennessee Broadband Accessibility Act (TBAA) to push broadband deployment in the state’s un- and under- served areas. At the time of TBAA’s passage, Tennessee ranked 29th in the nation for broadband accessibility.
The below-average ranking and the inadequacies of Tennessee’s broadband system were epitomized by the fact that prior to the state’s legislation only 2%
of urban citizens lacked internet access while in Tennessee’s rural areas only 34% of residents’ internet met minimum standards.
A location is considered “unserved” if
it has internet speeds at or below 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload, while “underserved” locations consist of available internet being below 100 Mbps download/20 Mbps upload.
The passage of the TBAA has resulted in a higher focus on broadband accessibility, and with the creation of the Tennessee State Broadband Office, which is housed in the Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development (TNECD), the state has made strides in the availability of high-speed internet service. Since 2018, TNECD has awarded $566.6 million
in broadband grants, serving more than 660,000 Tennesseans across 260,000 residential locations. This funding – prior to the utilization of
the BEAD Program – has spurred Tennessee’s improvement in broadband
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Get “Up to Speed”
About the Internet
The internet was invented in the 1960s during the Cold War for use by the U.S. Defense Department as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. By the 1980s, the term “internet” became popular and by the late 1990s was being used more and more – as world internet usage grew from 16 million to nearly 250 million people from 1996-2000. It
was also in the late 1990s that internet users were having better experiences online with the introduction of broadband, as broadband replaced the
days of dial-up 56-kilobit (k) internet modems. An example of how improved modems made internet use more convenient, according to an article in Quartz, “From Dial-up to 5G:
A Complete Guide to Logging on to the Internet,” 56k allowed “internet users to surf the web
at a blistering 56,000 bits per second. Today, we can download a 1 GB (Gigabyte is equivalent
to more than 1 million k) file in about 32 seconds, compared to around 3.5 days, which is what it would take on a 56k modem.”
2024, Issue 3
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