On Feb. 22, Lt. Governor Primavera announced a statewide initiative to increase awareness of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a long-term benefit to help eligible households pay for high-speed internet, with support from EducationSuperHighway. Seventy one (71) partner cities, community-based organizations and trusted institutions around Colorado were invited to participate in the initiative.
We are very excited to launch the Colorado Broadband Office Mapping Hub (Hub)! The Hub is now available at broadbandhub.colorado.gov and is an easy-to-use resource for the public, internet service providers (ISPs), schools, communities and businesses around Colorado for their broadband education and planning purposes.
The 2023 Colorado Broadband Data Collection opens tomorrow, Feb. 14 and runs through March 10, 2023.
We collect broadband availability data following the FCC data specifications. To learn more about data requirements and format, please visit our How to Submit Data web page.
Important Dates
A timeline is now available for the Broadband Deployment Board’s (BDB) 2023 Winter & Summer Grant Cycles. After spending the past few months collecting and incorporating stakeholder input and recommendations on process improvements, the BDB has officially kicked off the 2023 Grant year with updated Policies and Guidance documents.
We are excited to announce the Broadband Ready Community Program. This program will create an opportunity for communities in Colorado to become “broadband ready” ahead of upcoming historic federal funding disbursement. Through the past year of stakeholder engagement, we have gathered that local communities could greatly benefit from a guided approach to understanding their broadband needs as they begin to plan long-term projects. We have developed a list of tasks (Broadband Ready Community Checklist- see below) that communities can adopt on their way to becoming broadband ready.
On January 17 and 25, the CBO hosted it's Advance Industry and Community Roundtable meetings. In order to establish a regular cadence of communication with our partners, the CBO will hold these Roundtable meetings bi-monthly. The slides and recordings from January's Industry and Community Roundtable discussions can be found below. The next Roundtable discussions will take place in March 2023.
Advance Industry Roundtable (Jan. 17)
The Winter 2023 Grant Cycle Applications were due on January 15. The comment period was scheduled to begin on January 16, however we experienced technical issues that prevented us from publishing all applications for the opening of the comment period. All applications are now posted to our website. Accordingly, we are extending the public comment/response period by one day. Therefore, the Open Comment period is now from Tuesday, January 17, 2023 until Friday, March 3, 2023.
New Board Policies, Forms, and Guidance Document
Versions of the Guidance Document, BDB policies and relevant forms for use can be found on our website.
Updated on December 8:
On Dec. 7, the CBO Data Team hosted the second webinar in our Broadband Data & Mapping Webinar series, focused on understanding the FCC Map & challenge processes. We discussed:
Overview of the FCC Map & Data
Overview of Challenges
On Dec. 8, the Polis administration announced that the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) is awarding Colorado over $5 million to prepare for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding program. The BEAD program is the country’s largest-ever investment in broadband, and provides funding to build infrastructure and provide equitable opportunities through access to the internet.