Joseph Wender, director of the Capital Projects Fund, said at last week’s Broadband Nation Expo that the program has awarded all the states and territories their portion of the $10 billion fund, and the awardees have decided to spend $8 billion on broadband infrastructure projects.
The Capital Projects Fund was created as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which became law in March 2021. ARPA included a variety of programs to help Americans during and after the Covid crisis. The $10 billion Capital Projects Fund gave states funding for critical projects to enable work, education and healthcare in response to the public health crisis.
And here’s the required specs on the broadband…
The Capital Projects Fund requires awardees to provide broadband networks with speeds of 100 Gbps, symmetrical. Wender said the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which oversees the funds, wanted to mandate speeds that are future proof so that multiple people in the same household can use the internet at the same time without interruptions or buffering.