Rep. Snyder to address broadband efforts at Pennsylvania Telephone Association conference

State Rep. Pam Snyder (D-Greene/Fayette/Washington) will speak today at the Pennsylvania Telephone Association’s annual conference in Hershey to discuss various broadband initiatives.

“Representative Phillips-Hill and I, who chair the legislature’s newly formed Broadband Caucus, look forward to providing an overview of our initiatives, successes chalked up thus far, and where we are headed,” Snyder said. “This is an important issue to 800,000 Pennsylvanians, and we’re ecstatic to gain the support of the Pennsylvania Telephone Association as another key ally.”

Reps. Snyder and Phillips-Hill (R-York) recently introduced a four-bill package designed to bring high-speed internet to unserved and underserved rural areas. In April, the House Education Committee approved a component of the package that calls for an audit of the state’s Education Technology Fund.

The second bill seeks to establish a bipartisan, bicameral legislative commission to recommend improvements to high-speed broadband service deployment in unserved and underserved areas, while the third bill would direct the Joint State Government Commission to conduct an investigation and audit into the compliance of non-rural telecommunication carriers and report findings and recommendations to the legislature. The last bill would direct the Department of General Services to conduct an inventory of all state department, agency, commission or institution-owned communication towers, poles, buildings and facilities to leverage existing state-owned assets for the provisioning of high-speed broadband internet to unserved and underserved areas.

In March, Gov. Tom Wolf announced the creation of the Pennsylvania Office of Broadband Initiatives, which will develop and execute a statewide strategy to expand broadband access to every Pennsylvanian by 2022. Last month, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission launched an action to take jurisdiction of utility pole attachments from the federal government.