The Michigan Infrastructure Commission recognizes that current and emerging technologies are converging to enable new delivery methodologies for broadband. These technologies will depend on communications infrastructure that can adapt to new demands and the changing nature of technology.
Today, certain areas of Michigan are experiencing low density of households, businesses, and institutions which has resulted in limited or no return on investment for delivering broadband service to these places. Also, there is limited federal, state, and local government authority to encourage or require broadband deployment in underserved areas.
Michigan has made an effort to expand broadband services by leveraging federal programs, such as the Universal Service Fund www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service and the Connect America Fund www.fcc.gov/general/connect-america-fund-caf. However, despite these efforts, there are still barriers to achieving the expansion of broadband.
The Commission knows that new policies and regulations must be properly balanced so the state can have greater access to data, data sharing, and shared services. The Commission is collaborating with residents, departments within the state, privacy entities, infrastructure stakeholders, and technical experts to make recommendations to greatly benefit the state.
To further explain their ideas, the Commission recently released their “21st Century Infrastructure Commission Report” http://miinfrastructurecommission.com/document/report summarizing their communications recommendations in Chapter 4.
The report suggests that the State of Michigan create the “Michigan Consortium on Advanced Networks” to promote investments in emerging technologies, support academia research related to new technologies, improve the workforce, and address both mobile and fixed broadband access and adoption issues.
The Commission’s report suggests that funding be provided by:
- Providing a subsidy to stimulate private sector investments that would make available state-of-the-art broadband access to the portion of the state’s population that currently does not have access to at least 10Mb/1MB fixed broadband service because of low population density
- Creating a financing program to remove the installation cost barrier for customers who want to pay for onetime costs for equipment to prepare the site to receive commercially available broadband
- Developing a grant or revolving loan program to assist local units of government and private sector broadband providers in public-private partnership projects to support the sharing and joint use of existing horizontal and vertical assets and network facilities
The report points out that the state must recognize the way that current and emerging technologies are converging to create new opportunities and must encourage the delivery of new methodologies for broadband such as fiber optics, wireless, satellite, and other technologies yet to be developed.