The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) in partnership with the state’s rural
regions has invested over $5 million in major projects supporting rural broadband
demand aggregation and telemedicine, working with 7 regional consortia involving 35
of California’s 58 counties. In addition, rural leaders continue to pursue ready projects
to connect K-12 and higher education facilities. We’ve engaged public officials, civic
leaders, stakeholders and industry to advance broadband. These efforts have yielded
numerous “shovel ready” projects statewide.
The thrust of the demand aggregation projects is to quantify how much demand exists
that may not have been recognized previously by the marketplace and to identify assets
that could be used to facilitate deployment that might not have been made available
before to providers. Specifically, the projects are tasked to accomplish the following:
(a) quantify individual and aggregated demand by prospective anchor tenants, industry
clusters, and residential areas, including price sensitivity; (b) map infrastructure and
other fixed assets that could be used to help deploy broadband service; (c) simplify
county and municipal policies; and (d) tap the ingenuity of entrepreneurs in the region.
Thus, there is an increasing reliable information base to determine how much public
funding is required to achieve the goal of ubiquitous rural broadband availability.
Public investments and incentives for rural broadband deployment also need to require
sufficient speeds to accommodate applications today and in the future. Now is not the