When California announced in 2021 that it would open a last-mile broadband grant program seeded with $2 billion, it was something of a watershed moment.
The Last-Mile Federal Funding Account (FFA) broadband program,* as it was called, instantly became one of the largest state-administered broadband grant programs ever. Along with other broadband programs overseen by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the FFA program sought to significantly close the digital divide by ensuring that at least 98 percent of households had broadband access.
Municipalities, cooperatives, Tribal entities and community-based nonprofit networks seized this opportunity to take charge of their digital futures, submitting nearly one hundred applications in more than 40 counties across the state.
As grant announcements began rolling out in June of 2024, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) began tracking where that money was going and, specifically, the kinds of applicants that were successful in the program. What emerged was indisputable: California’s Federal Funding Account broadband program was an unprecedented success for community networks.
At communitynetworks.org, we have published numerous stories highlighting innovative and successful applications, including projects by Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications, the City of Huntington Park, the City of Oakland, Cold Springs Rancheria, and the City of Indio.
Today we are releasing a new two-part dashboard based on the CPUC’s data that helps visualize the success of community-based projects in this transformative state program. (The CPUC also has a very helpful interactive dashboard with more detail on each project, but it does not share our focus on community networks). Hover on each visualization within this dashboard for additional detail.
Go to the Interactive Dashboard to fully explore the data
One view in the dashboard focuses on the funding that has been distributed through the FFA program thus far.
In this view, the map visualizes the relative size of grant amounts per county and the percentage of those grants that went to community networks, in which we group municipal or other public entities, Tribal governments, cooperatives, and nonprofits. Here we see that community networks saw success across many different areas of the state, but that something of a bifurcation emerged. Relatively few counties saw a mixture of community-owned and for-profit applicants win awards.
Other graphs in this view break down the awarded grants in other ways. One shows the cumulative amount of grant funding awarded by provider type as time went by, and another shows the relative amount of funding requested and awarded by provider type.
Finally, you can also see a chart showing amounts awarded in the first phase of the program compared to the original amount allocated for each county in the program design. It is important to note that only a little more than $1 billion out of the planned $2 billion dollars has been announced.
The CPUC has recently closed a second round of applications which focused exclusively on the six counties for which there were no awards made in the first round. On its website, the Commission notes that additional funding is expected to be allocated to the program by the state in upcoming fiscal years, though it is not clear whether applications that went unselected in the first round of funding will be reconsidered in subsequent rounds.
The second view focuses on the status of applications by different provider types in the program. The two maps in this view highlight the counties in which community networks were successful and where they were unsuccessful.
While ILSR celebrates the larger number of community networks that won grants, we must acknowledge that, for now at least, a number of cooperatives and municipalities will not be moving forward on broadband deployment plans with state funds.
*The program was originally slated to distribute American Rescue Plan Act funds that the state received from the federal government, hence the name Federal Funding Account. Ultimately, the planned ARPA spending was obligated elsewhere and state appropriations were used to support the program.
Header image of Welcome to California sign courtesy of Curtis Gregory on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic