The original State Broadband Initiative (SBI) was a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which is more commonly referred to as the Stimulus. The SBI's goal was to create a comprehensive broadband map that covered every state and territory in the United States. The uses of the map are manifold: as a tool for consumers, a centralized compilation of information for the federal and state governments to use in matters of regulation and public policy, and as a trove of data for think tanks and research institutions.
In addition to the mapping aspect of the SBI, there was also a planning component. The goal of the planning sect ion was to create a comprehensive plan to understand the extent of broadband usage and ownership, barriers to adoption, and to create a plan to overcome these barriers and to boost broadband usage through work with nonprofits, local governmental agencies, and public policy advocacy.
For the initial survey in 2011, One Global Economy was selected by the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) Department of Commerce to fulfill the broadband mapping grant that was awarded to them by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). One Global Economy is a global nonprofit community development organization whose goal it is to help low-income people gain greater access to and utility from broadband Internet connect ions.
One Global Economy's final deliverable was a comprehensive report that will assess the current state of broadband in CNMI by determining how fast the connect ions are, what proportion of the population has access to broadband, what proportion of the population subscribes to broadband; identifying the most common barriers to broadband adoption and use; and creating a blueprint towards greater broadband usage wit h recommendations for the local governments of the three most populated islands: Saipan, Rota, and Tinian, the federal government, local NGOs, local Internet service providers, and the people of CNMI.
The first step in this process was to draw upon the information and maps that the local telecom providers had to share with the entities undertaking the mapping project. These maps showed the approximate reach of where each telecom can offer service, what the maximum advertised upload and download speeds are, and what type of service they offer-DSL or cable, for example. These maps gave us a rough lay of the land and provided us with a good jumping off point for further research.
Using these maps information as a starting point, and drawing upon the knowledge of a local liaison, we were able to hold a series of 14 community meetings and focus groups. The main purpose of these meetings was to help us customize the NTIA's community broadband survey to make it locally relevant, culturally sensitive, and provide us with more detail about the experience of going online for the people of CNMI. For instance, knowing that many young people in CNMI get online at the Mobil Station in Garapan helps get a better understanding of the role of unsecured wireless networks in public places in the online ecosystem of Saipan.
-- Except from 2014 CNMI Broadband Survey Report, Page(s) 1 - 2 -- See Attached.
v1.0: Edited Data; anonymous dataset.
