The Free State is Working to Make Broadband Affordable and Accessible to All

“Oh, give me a home where the [broadband service is at least 100/20], where the [kids can study online and] play.”

Well, thanks to the diligent work being done by the Kansas Office of Broadband Deployment (KOBD), you will be able to find that home in the Free State.

Kansas gets its nickname from when it became the 34th state to join the Union in 1861, as a free state – that is, one where slavery was illegal.

Kansas quickly came to occupy a niche in the American psyche; homesteads on vast tracts of open land beneath a sky full of stars promised freedom and a fresh start for many. 

But despite the enormous opportunities of moving out west, Kansans weren’t promised an easy life, and their state motto reflects this: Ad astra per aspera – latin for “to the stars through difficulties.”

And indeed, the Jade Piros de Carvalho and her team at KOBD has embodied this adage to the letter – stalwart in the face of all of the challenges that have beared down on them. Ready is proud to power KOBD, helping them scale and grow in the ways that they need to in order to ensure that every Jayhawker has access to the broadband they need and deserve.

KOBD is using Ready’s Grant Optimizer tool to enable the development of a statewide high-level design for a fiber network that reaches serviceable locations in even the most remote corners of the Free State. 

The KOBD team is also using Ready’s Challenge Process Coordinator to facilitate the state’s challenge process. Kansas is racing to be one of the first states to actually deploy BEAD funding as every day without deploying broadband infrastructure is another that families go without broadband. 

Kansas is also making use of the Ready Research Platform as well as the Performance Test & Survey in order to assist with broadband availability research and network design.

A few things come to mind when most people think of the state of Kansas: agriculture, buffalo, sunflowers, and maybe the Wizard of Oz. But the KOBD team is working hard to get “high-speed broadband” added to Kansas’ game of word association.