It is expected that on Monday, President Joe Biden will announce his administration's plans to distribute billions of dollars allocated by Congress to connect every household and small business in the United States to the internet.
The event is scheduled to start at 11:45 AM Eastern Time. Watch it in the player above.
Federal Program to Bring Internet to Underserved Americans
In a press call on Friday previewing the announcement, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said that, similar to the push for universal connectivity with the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, when the federal government installed electrical utility lines that lit up rural America, high-speed internet access is now a necessity for daily life like electricity.
Zients said, 'We all know how hard life can be when the power goes out after a storm or for other reasons. For millions of Americans in rural communities, in particular, high-speed internet is too often out of reach. Sometimes there's not even any access.'
The amount each state, territory, and Washington, DC will receive from the $42.5 billion program primarily depends on the number of unserved locations in each jurisdiction or those locations lacking access to internet speeds of at least 25 megabits per second for downloads and 3 megabits per second for uploads. Download speeds include retrieving information from the internet, including streaming movies and television. Upload speeds determine how quickly information is transmitted from a computer to the internet, such as sending emails or posting photos online.
More than 7% of the country falls under the category of underserved, according to maps recently completed by the Federal Communications Commission for the giant task force.
Congress Passes BEAD Initiative to Expand Broadband Access in the US
Congress passed the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD, along with several other internet expansion initiatives, through the infrastructure bill signed by the Democratic president in 2021.