LANSING, MI (WTVB) – The state’s new Connecting Michigan Communities (CMIC) grant program is awarding an additional $15.3 million in funding to support 20 projects across the state to expand broadband infrastructure and provide access to high-speed internet.
Mercury Wireless was awarded $428,000 for project in Branch, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, and St. Joseph counties to expand broadband service.
In making the grant announcement in conjunction with the Department of Technology, Management and Budget, Michigan Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist said “We will continue to invest in expanding infrastructure to allow all Michiganders the opportunity to access high-speed internet. The funding in the CMIC grant will increase access for families and better connect people, communities, and businesses across Michigan.”
This is the third round of awards.
As well-intentioned as the people at Connected Nation are, their maps are incomplete and outdated at best, and misleading at worst. The areas depicted in green on the map displayed claim to show “broadband service created in unserved areas since Sept 2017”. That is not even remotely close to accurate. For starters, the green shaded areas almost perfectly reflect the coverage footprint of Charter/Spectrum. Did charter not exist before 2017? In fact, the only changes in those areas were some software driven and supporting hardware upgrades to the Charter/Spectrum network that allowed them to increase their speed capacities and even those have been unevenly distributed. Compounding this is that the areas shown are driven by FCC Form 477 data which is derived through a self-reporting method. In other words, Charter/Spectrum filed paperwork essentially claiming their service meets a particular standard and then claimed that since they were servicing PART of an entire census block they then claim the ENTIRE census block is covered when many people in the depicted footprint would beg to differ. Also not represented is the continuing outstanding coverage in the City of Coldwater brought to residents and businesses by CBPU. How was that unserved in 2017?? It was already very capably served. Connected Nation is a poor industry resource and the State of Michigan is ill-advised to use their information to inform the state or Michiganders of what the real state of broadband is in Branch County or any other county.
As to the article and the announcement of Mercury Wireless, for starters $428 thousand dollars covers very little in the world of broadband networking, they are an out of state operator that has not shown the capacity to build all of their RDOF awarded territory as of yet. Additionally, reading the full statement, $428k for a project in Branch, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, and St Joseph counties means in actuality very little is going to get spent in Branch county, and if you examine the RDOF maps you will see why, because the FCC chose to cater to the phone and cable operators and exclude over 98% of Branch county due to their flawed methodology.
Bottom Line: Branch County needs better broadband and should not wait for the very people who created the problem to fix the problem…