2024 Wrapped: Reflections and Ambitions
As the new year approaches, we reflect on the past 12 months—how the world has changed, what we accomplished, and what we hope for 2025. Last year was a significant one for Vernonburg Group, and for governments, companies, non-profits, and other organizations seeking to close the global digital divide.
Domestically, landmark programs to close the digital divide (e.g., Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment and Digital Equity) launched. For the first time in history, states and territories have strategies to ensure universal broadband access and digital equity and have sufficient funding to implement them.
Globally, universal high-speed mobile and fixed broadband availability and adoption are now recognized as essential to social and economic participation and increasingly are central to national plans for economic growth and resilience. We are seeing increased investments in expanding infrastructure to underserved communities, but these investments are still miniscule compared to the size of the gap that needs closing. Providers are rolling out new approaches to provide high-quality internet service to the most people in the most affordable way.
Here at Vernonburg Group, we’ve been busy in the midst of all of this. Our team doubled in size this year, accomplishing extensive work around the world, including:
Policy and Strategy: In the US, we developed the State of Vermont’s BEAD and Digital Equity plans, approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Vernonburg Group also filed comments on NTIA’s draft BEAD Alternative Technology Policy Notice.
Feasibility Studies: We’re wrapping up comprehensive broadband expansion feasibility studies for internet service provider (ISP) and digital infrastructure clients in Nigeria, India, and South Africa.
Access to Capital: We are working with USAID and other stakeholders to set up a fund—Connect One Billion—that will help ISPs in low- and middle-income countries close capacity gaps and raise the capital they need to scale their businesses.
Research and Publications: We published a paper—Achieving Internet for All: Socioeconomics and Fixed Broadband in the United States— that examines publicly available data on fixed broadband network deployments in the U.S. and shows that race/ethnicity or income does not impact high-speed broadband availability overall and that rurality is the biggest determinant of broadband availability. We also published several blogs on topics ranging from how every state can create a digital equity and opportunity dividend, how data visualization can be used to help advocate for digital equity initiatives, the foundation for establishing evidence-informed digital equity programs, and more.
Data Visualization: We launched, leveraged, and updated our free online Broadband Funding Optimization Tool as well as the Digital Equity Map in support of anyone planning and preparing broadband expansion and digital equity programs.
Grant Support: We supported several US public broadband infrastructure and digital equity grant applications for programs like the US Department of Agriculture Broadband Technical Assistance grant, ReConnect, and the NTIA Digital Equity Competitive Grant.
New Initiatives: We’re working on some exciting new initiatives we’ll be able to announce next year. Stay tuned.
We’ve had the great pleasure of working with many valued partners across the US and the world. We look forward to what we can accomplish together in 2025, ensuring millions more around the world can affordably, meaningfully, and safely use the internet. To maintain the momentum and sustain the impact, a few things will be important:
Access to financing for last-mile broadband networks in rural areas and in emerging markets remains a key barrier to broadband availability.
Broadband availability is only one piece of the puzzle. Ensuring people can afford broadband services, understand its relevance to their lives, and engage productively and safely online is key to unlocking the benefits while ensuring the sustainability of the infrastructure in which we’ve invested. Meaningful broadband adoption must be the ultimate aim of our efforts.
Resources are not infinite, but we have the information, tools, technologies, and the experience to know how to impactfully allocate them. Failure to use them to guide policy and programming interventions, as well as funding allocations, will squander resources.
Thank you for trusting Vernonburg Group to help you close the global digital divide.