The Wisconsin Public Service Commission has awarded $125 million in broadband extension grants for 71 projects aimed at reaching approximately 83,000 homes and 4,600 businesses.
The projects will impact 45 counties, according to the PSC, and bring new or improved internet access to areas that are underserved and underexposed.
In total, there were 194 applications requesting more than $495 million in funding. A screening panel reviewed each application, awarded a score, and then the commissioners made the final decisions.
“We will continue to make the investments necessary to ensure that everyone in our state has access to affordable broadband,” PSC chairman Rebecca Cameron Valcq said in a statement on Thursday.
Bug Tussel, a national Internet service provider based in Green Bay, was awarded approximately $20 million to expand service in Jefferson, Clark, Lincoln, Marathon, Green Lake, Rock and other counties.
Engineering is already underway and construction will take place in many areas by 2023, said Steve Schneider, Bug Tussel president and CEO.
“All of this makes for a damn good day,” he said.
More than $5 million went to three projects in Vilas County aimed at reaching 3,000 homes and businesses. Service providers in the province have been among the top recipients of broadband subsidies for years.
The PSC says about 650,000 people in the state don’t have internet access at home from 25 megabit-per-second downloads and 3 Mbps uploads, nothing special in today’s digital world, but enough for streaming a video or following an online video. lesson. In addition, officials say, another 650,000 people simply cannot afford the service available to them.
Those numbers come as state and federal agencies have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars expanding broadband services. Yet in many places it is still painfully difficult to work from home or even upload a video because the internet speeds are so slow and unreliable.
The PSC says its goal is to ensure that everyone has access to at least minimal broadband speeds and that most people have much better service than that in the next five years.
During Thursday’s meeting in Madison, Commissioner Ellen Nowak objected to some of the grant spending and the process of awarding $125 million through public-private partnerships.
“While I voted to approve the entire package of proposed projects, I continue to have serious reservations about the financing scheme proposed by Bug Tussel. Their new interpretation of a public-private partnership allows the local government to act as a bank and guarantor for the private company,” Nowak said.
“This is a risky venture for taxpayers and leads to little to no risk to the private entity. I don’t believe that’s what the legislature intended when they passed the law,” she added.
Nowak said she would have preferred to fund more projects that use fiber optic cable to deliver services directly to homes, rather than wireless services, which tend to be much slower and less reliable.
According to some in the industry, it could cost several billion dollars to address all the broadband coverage gaps in the state. The grants are aimed at areas that are difficult to connect due to low population density or geography.
In the past eight years, 434 broadband grants have been awarded through the Public Service Commission using state and federal funds. But while many areas have benefited from the grants, some will have to be funded more than once because the original service was inadequate.
“We’re now going back and covering areas that we’ve covered in grant rounds that were not too long ago,” Nowak said.