The state is gearing up for a multimillion-dollar push to improve internet accessibility next year.
The Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism recently published a draft of its Digital Equity Plan, a document that establishes a multiyear series of strategies to improve internet connectivity throughout Hawaii.
The draft enumerates the state’s various shortcomings in making online connectivity and services accessible to all its residents. According to the document, about 11% of the state’s residents — and 15% of Hawaii Island’s — are “covered populations,” a term used by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to refer to various groups that are more likely to encounter barriers to internet access.
These “covered populations” include kupuna, the incarcerated, veterans, people with disabilities, people who have a language barrier, minority groups, low-income households and rural populations.
Burt Lum, DBEDT’s state broadband coordinator, said the Digital Equity Plan will help determine which projects will be funded in a series of grant awards that should open next year.
“Each state is going to get an allocation of money from the NTIA,” Lum said. “We won’t know exactly how much we’ll get until they announce it, but we’re expecting somewhere around $12 million, maybe $13 million.”
With that money, Lum said the state will open up applications for capacity grant projects — projects aimed at improving the telecommunication infrastructure capacity — sometime around the second quarter of 2024.
Following that, public and private organizations in Hawaii also will be able to apply for another pool of federal funding available to all states through a competitive application process, although Lum added it’s still unclear how much money will be available and who will be eligible to apply.
Successful applications through either of these grant processes will be those that carry out at least one of the plan’s nine strategies to improve digital equity. Those broad strategies include developing training programs to better equip covered populations for working with digital technology, making online devices and inexpensive Wi-Fi more readily available, integrating digital literacy education into K-12 schools, and more.
Each of the nine strategies in the plan includes goals for the state to reach by 2024, 2026 and 2028.
For example, the document sets a goal that by 2026, a statewide discount program will be established to bring the cost of online devices down by $500 per device, and by 2028, at least 50% of eligible Hawaii households will have obtained a device through that program, and at least 75% of households will have devices for each member.
Lum said the Digital Equity Plan was developed over about eight months and was influenced by several recent disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic — when the need for social distancing and online school and work requirements cast into stark relief the dearth of reliable internet access in parts of the state — and the Lahaina wildfires.
“Emergency response times weren’t at the top of mind when we developed the plan,” Lum said. “In one sense, the need for broadband was highlighted by the pandemic, but that was a three-year-long disaster. But when Lahaina happened, right when we were finishing up the plan, and people weren’t able to communicate, it really showed how important connectivity is.”
Lum said the action items and goals in the plan might be tweaked further during an ongoing public comment period throughout October. He said public feedback isn’t likely to substantially change the document, but the comments might cast a greater focus on certain aspects of the plan.
For example, he said some organizations already have requested greater emphasis be placed on the need for telehealth resources.
Residents can read the plan at broadband.hawaii.gov/digitalequityplan and comment on it until Oct. 31. Lum said a final version of the plan should be published around January 2024.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
