The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it is all set to distribute $800 million to help fund improvements to rural broadband coverage across the country.
The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund will dish the cash out to six providers who will then connect more than 350,000 locations in 19 states.
The states that received the most funding are Illinois, Arizona, and Iowa.
US broadband
There is no specific technology outlined by the FCC, which says the premises will be connected via a combination of fibre, fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband that uses a mobile network to deliver fixed line quality connectivity, or a hybrid of the two standards.
“This funding will connect more households throughout the country with high-speed broadband as part of our ongoing work to close the digital divide,” said FCC chairwoman Rosenworcel.
“We are confident these projects can bring quality service to currently unserved areas.”
The latest funding brings the total amount distributed via the initiative to more than US$6 billion across 47 different states.
The current minimum standard of broadband in the US has been set at 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload, however the FCC has indicated that this benchmark is no longer sufficient to support the applications that Americans need for work, entertainment, and everyday life.
It plans to increase the minimum standard to 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload, with an intention to achieve 1Gbps and 500Mbps in the future.
English
Arabic
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Igbo
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malagasy
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Yoruba