Penn State Extension Assists In State’s Federal Broadband Funding

Pennsylvania will receive nearly $1.2 billion in federal funding to establish or improve high-speed internet service in unserved and underserved areas — an amount that would have been more than $100 million smaller without the work of Penn State Extension, officials said.

Announced June 26 by President Joe Biden, the state’s allocation is part of $42.5 billion in broadband funding authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority late last year contracted with Penn State Extension to develop and update state broadband service availability maps to enable the commonwealth to maximize its federal funding allocation for high-speed internet expansion under the act’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.

Subsequently, Penn State Extension educators developed public broadband spatial analysis and mapping tools and evaluated the accuracy of industry-provided data to inform the state’s process of challenging discrepancies in Federal Communications Commission maps of broadband service availability. This work helped the authority to identify more than 50,000 Pennsylvania service-availability claims that appeared to be incorrectly reported as having access to high-speed internet and to submit challenges to the FCC by the Jan. 13 deadline.

The FCC upheld more than 28,000 of those service-availability challenges, resulting in an estimated $117 million more in Pennsylvania’s share of the federal funding, according to James Ladlee, state program leader for Extension’s Emerging and Advanced Technology Initiative.

Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi said she is proud of Penn State’s partnership with the commonwealth to expand high-speed internet access to Pennsylvania households.

“Extension’s mapping effort resulting in more than 100 million additional dollars awarded to Pennsylvania demonstrates its value as a regional, national and international leader and partner, central to Penn State’s land-grant mission of teaching, research and public service,” she said.

Ladlee said the average total allocation across all states and U.S. territories was just under $743 million. “Partly as a result of Penn State’s work, the commonwealth was one of only 19 states whose funding allocation topped $1 billion,” he added.

Harry Crissy, business and community vitality extension educator, noted that from the time Penn State Extension entered the contract with the Broadband Development Authority until the Jan. 13 deadline for service-availability challenges, there was little time to complete the mapping and analytical work.

“To meet the FCC’s deadline and quickly identify service-availability gaps, our team of about 22 people spent much of December 2022 manually verifying nearly 13,000 random addresses — from every service provider in every county — against data filed with the FCC,” Crissy said. “We then used the potential gaps identified in this first phase of the project to conduct a spatial analysis against the existing FCC and infrastructure claims to identify additional availability challenges. In the end, the authority submitted more than 50,000 total availability challenges based on this work.”

Crissy and Ladlee also credited Extension Educator Tom Beresnyak for his role in helping to coordinate the project.

Ladlee pointed out that Extension previously worked in partnership with the state Public Utility Commission on mapping tools that helped the state obtain almost $369 million in broadband funding under a different federal program, which is expected to enable up to 327,000 Pennsylvanians to gain high-speed internet access. He explained that improving the state’s broadband map is an ongoing effort that will help ensure accurate and equitable distribution of resources in the future.

“While the map we developed for the authority will continue to evolve and be updated, it’s an excellent start to help Pennsylvania identify areas for further review through the upcoming state challenge process, which is required now that the federal funding has been awarded,” he said.