In a perfect example of government investment paying dividends, New Hampshire is getting very close to being the first state with 100% broadband access, as Gov. Ayotte mentioned in a press conference Wednesday. The UNH Broadband Mapping service (here) claims 98.5% coverage (i.e., 98.5% of the state’s “address locations”, homes and businesses and government buildings, are within reach of broadband or have it), with 0.7% underserved and 0.8% unserved.
Note that this is the FCC definition of broadband – 25 megabits per second download and 3 mbps upload – which is pretty feeble these days, but it’s better than nothing. Also note that it depends on information provided by ISPs, so there might be some gaps or disagreement about what constitutes a connection.
New Hampshire has been working on this for a very long time. I was among the volunteers on the NH Network, a test of a regional dial-up system in the mid-1990s (I wrote about how cool it was to see what books were kept in a library in what was then Czechoslovakia, even if you couldn’t actually read them), while the legislature created a Telecommunications Planning and Development Advisory Committee in 2000 that has produced various government and quasi-government groups.
The key, however, is money to buy and lay out fiber-optic cables and switches and other gear. This is where the government come in. The state has put some money in the system over the years but most of it has been federal money channeled through the state, notably some $318 million by NH BEA estimates from ARPA funding (COVID-era money) and the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. BOth of those date from President Biden’s term.
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