First State Runs for First in Broadband

With a combination of a fast-growing population and the second-smallest area of all the states, Delaware is on track to be the first in the country to provide connectivity to all. The first state has been investing in broadband for over a decade and most of its addresses have been connected. 

“Our goal is to have Delaware be the first state in the country to connect every home and business to high-speed internet within the next few years. If there is any state that can connect every home and business, it ought to be Delaware,” said Governor John Carney in an October 2023 press release. “Every family deserves high-quality internet for school, work, and entertainment.”

A combination of federal programs and state money invested over the past decade has enabled broadband expansion to all but 5,700 unserved and underserved addresses in the state as of mid-summer 2024, with BEAD funding expected to easily bring the rest across the finish line and making it the first to provide universal broadband coverage to every location. 

Delaware Governor John Carney (L), Roddy Flynn, Executive Director, Delaware Broadband Office (Podium) and Delaware CIO Greg Lane (R) at press conference announcing ARPA awards. (Source: Delaware Department of Technology and Information)

“We have a really diverse state in terms of geography and municipal and rural areas,” said Roddy Flynn, Executive Director, Delaware Broadband Office. “Wilmington is our largest city, but suburban New Castle County, our northern most county, is a fairly dense [area] in the northern part [of the state]. Then we go down into farmlands and Kent County with Dover, our capital. Sussex County, our southernmost county, has the beaches and is a lot of farmland.”

By percentage growth rate, Delaware ranks among the top five fastest growing states in the country, with a rate of over 5% growth since 2020, according to the World Population Review website with Sussex County the fastest growing in America. “We are one of the biggest importers of people of any state,” said Flynn. “Delaware recognized this as an exciting challenge a long time ago and has been investing in expanding high-speed internet for over 10 years.” 

Delaware’s first move to improve broadband was to partner with Crown Castle in 2014 fortify the middle mile network running north to south across the state from Wilmington through Dover and Georgetown, then moving eastward to cover Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach. Improved middle mile made it cheaper for private investment to build out last mile connections to individual homes, businesses, and farms, continuing to steadily extend broadband across the state over time. 

Supplementing private broadband investment to build broadband were state and federal programs, including an FCC RDOF award to bring connectivity to 3,100 currently unserved addresses and $33 million in ARPA funding to reach over 6,000 locations over the past few years. 

“BEAD is going to be the thing that allows us to be the first state in the country to be fully connected to high-speed internet,” said Flynn. “We anticipate our BEAD allocation will be sufficient to a solely fiber deployment to every unserved and underserved BSL in Delaware. Fiber is our gold standard for what we’re going to be delivering to our constituents, certainly what they expect and need. We’re also hoping that even after the BEAD allocation, we’ll have built out these fiber networks that can be scaled up much more inexpensively once you’re out into every corner of the state.”

Delaware had both BEAD Volume I and II approval as well as full approval on its challenge process as of early September 2024, with the broadband office halfway through the subgrantee selection process. “We finished our pre-qualification phase,” said Flynn. “Those that are successful are currently preparing their scoring application, the actual bids that they will put together for each of the grant areas in Delaware. We anticipate our deadline for those applications is in October and we anticipate having our preliminary awards made by the end of November, and our final plan out for public comment in December. So, we’re moving very, very quickly.”

Delaware expects to be the first state to reach 100% address coverage. (Source: Delaware Department of Technology and Information)

Flynn cited “great work” with the Delaware Department of Transportation and other agencies for streamlining permitting when spending ARPA funding, delivering broadband to around 6,900 unserved homes in under two and a half years. “I think BEAD will be under a very similar aggressive timeline,” said Flynn. “It’ll be more expensive, obviously, inflation, supply chain, it’ll be more money. The remaining homes in Delaware that aren’t connected are a little more remote, will have a higher investment cost, but we are gearing up fully working very closely with our state permitting agencies to move as quickly as possible. I’m confident that Delaware will be the first state to finish their BEAD investment.”

As more development continues in Kent and Sussex counties with more jobs flowing in, Flynn said the fiber network will continue to foster economic growth through in-person employment and facilitating remote work for everyone in Delaware.  

But things haven’t always been smooth sailing. Flynn further detailed the challenges in building broadband across Delaware at a State Broadband Officials roundtable session with his peers from Maryland and Virginia on September 12, 2024, at Rural Fiber Expo 2024 in Annapolis, Maryland. 

“We only have three counties,” said Flynn. “The biggest surprise for me has been it’s not often a huge area that doesn’t have any [broadband] access. There are one-off homes. You have a street with every home on the street has access and one that does not and that’s a huge pain in the butt.  The ISP didn’t want to build down a long driveway and the homeowner couldn’t afford to take that cost to themselves. Throughout the state there are places that have been completely skipped for whatever reason.”

The Delaware State Broadband Office has had to deal with instances where homeowners don’t want to let construction crews onto their property to bring in fiber, with one case “where it almost got violent.” Flynn and his staff have tried to work with holdouts to convince them to participate, noting that their grandchildren may need access and that having fiber is a necessary utility when it comes time to sell their home. 

“We’ve already had some people who turned us down under ARPA to do the drop to their house and have come back and said, ‘Can you do it now?’,” said Flynn. “We can’t go back and do it because that money is now obligated.” 

Other challenges have arisen in trying to get high-speed broadband into multi-unit dwellings and mobile home communities, first in getting the properties appropriately classified as unserved or underserved and then being able to build into those areas. “At the end of the day, I don’t know if those property managers are going to let them in the building,” said Flynn. “And then we have this problem with mobile home communities, where the property manager may have their own deal with a satellite provider or an unlicensed wireless provider that just doesn’t provide good service. We can’t wire up to those homes, unless the property lets us in.”