Optimize broadband infrastructure to address the digital divide:
With more than 30 years of experience providing program management services to nationwide customers, HGA is recognized as one of the leading disaster recovery infrastructure firms in the country. During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, reliable, access to broadband connectivity has become increasingly essential to daily life, particularly as employers transitioned from working from home and schools migrated to virtual classrooms. Many areas in the United States—particularly rural areas—had limited or no access to broadband communications.
HGA broadband consultants have the scale, technology, process, and expertise to help you address broadband mapping, broadband feasibility, digital equity and digital inclusion, and broadband infrastructure initiatives. Whatever your project entails, our broadband network engineers have the experience across the full network platform to help you design and deliver networks and solutions across various platforms, including broadband networks.
States are playing a crucial role in efforts to expand broadband access, encouraging broadband investment, and helping bring more residents online through government-funded initiatives. HGA has recently taken on assisting multiple communities with broadband deployment and addressing multiple planning and operational objectives to provide/enhance high-speed coverage to all unserved and underserved areas.
Broadband infrastructure initiatives funded under the CARES Act and ARPA provide federal funding for state and local governments to expand broadband access and help bring more residents online. As a leading disaster recovery provider, the HGA broadband team has been providing application development support for CARES Act and ARPA funding for multiple counties and municipalities. Our team is also managing emergency rental and utility assistance programs through these funding sources.
Our scope of Broadband Program Management Services include:
- Map existing transmission paths, such as fiber (dark or lit) and long/short haul microwave, that could be used to reduce the financial and logistical burden of a buildout
- Identify regulatory issues that could impact readiness with an additional negative impact on cost and schedule performance, including zoning, permitting, and environmental concerns
- Identify and discuss commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology platforms and solutions that were been designed with rural service areas in mind or are easily adaptable to rural environments.
- Identify best practices to be operationalized in the future to sustain the system, to include operations and maintenance (O&M) and the best structure for the standard service-level agreement (SLA) that will be executed with network subscribers.
- Develop broadband mapping reports of existing coverage area, with population densities and review of existing infrastructure.
- Explore targeted coverage that allows a phased deployment approach, resulting in early capture of subscribers and the creation of a revenue stream that provides additional funding for the long-term broadband buildout.
Additional broadband mapping tailored to your infrastructure challenges:
Ensuring that you achieve the best coverage analysis, HGA’s Broadband Team leverages our in-house GIS professionals and database developers to identify existing infrastructure and map pathways forward. Bringing broadband access to the communities needing it most is inherently a spatial challenge. Our GIS Analysts work hand-in-hand with our broadband subject matter experts to connect the existing broadband sources to the desired destinations. Communicating to stakeholders the results of initial resource assessments and overlying proposed network buildouts is accomplished through HGA’s GIS portals and map packages.