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Broadband Council Approves Final Draft of Action Plan

Called for last summer in an Executive Order from Gov. Gavin Newsom, the plan presents challenges, goals and estimated costs to enable deployment of faster, farther-reaching broadband across the state.

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Members of the California Broadband Council (CBC) have approved the preliminary final draft of their new Broadband Action Plan 2020, California Broadband for All, which they were tasked in August with creating by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The vote on Thursday was unanimous to approve the plan’s content and substance, with additional comments and tweaks received during a two-hour Zoom meeting. Members acknowledged that the plan likely will continue to be iterated upon — and in his Executive Order, Newsom mandated the plan be reviewed annually. The finished plan is due by year’s end. Among the takeaways:

  • The plan, California Department of Technology Chief Strategist Justin Cohan-Shapiro told CBC members, adjusts the baseline definition of broadband speed and performance to meet the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 standard of a minimum of 25 Mbps (megabits per second) download and 3 Mbps upload (25/3 Mbps). The plan notes that “California’s current standard is slower than the FCC’s definition.” However, the plan also sets a goal of “100/20 Mbps that reflects the Governor’s Executive Order of a minimum of 100 Mbps download, and growing demand for higher upload speeds.”
    “Those dual definitions would bring the state in alignment with federal standards and adopt a forward-looking view for what broadband demand will look like in the future,” Cohan-Shapiro said.
  • This will be expensive, of course. Representing Marybel Batjer, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, Robert Osborn, director of CPUC’s communication division, elaborated on a cost model commissioned from CostQuest Associates Inc. That model “builds example network infrastructure to serve all the unserved locations,” Osborn said, and either generates a brownfield build — extending on existing infrastructure — or a greenfield build with new infrastructure from scratch. The model estimated costs of $5.6 billion for 25/3 Mbps “last mile network speeds”; $6.8 billion for 100/10 Mbps; and $6.7 billion for 100 Mbps download and no estimated upload speed. The model can “use different technologies,” Osborn said, but in the interest of time, resources and simplicity, officials used fiber optic for its quality and durability and because “essentially, all technologies eventually connect to fiber anyways … .” The estimates, Osborn added, were for 100 percent coverage and included tribal lands.
  • A key challenge to achieving broadband for all is data, Cohan-Shapiro said, expanding on that portion of the plan — and emphasizing that, from a policy perspective, much data is missing or unclear around “availability and adoption” of broadband. On subscription data, Cohan-Shapiro said data isn’t an end in itself, adding: “The reason why we care about data is to help inform the way that we do our work as a state, to be able to drive towards broadband for all more effectively and accurately. And we know that it’s going to be a continued challenge to help optimize the work that we do going ahead, to continue to improve the data that we have available to ourselves.”
Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.