Specifications include, but are not limited to: The Authority is interested in ensuring that the approach of the public-private partnership effectively serves community needs and addresses the initial concerns that led the Cities to form it. Important priorities are: • Reliable and secure backhaul communications connectivity to support the needs of public safety entities and national security institutions. • Availability of dark fiber for internal governmental needs of the Cities. • Foster an ecosystem for low-cost internet service providers to meet demand for affordable internet to address both the business and the residential Digital Divide in the Cities. • Provide bandwidth to support growing educational needs (e.g., virtual classrooms). • Provide affordable access to underserved and unserved citizens to address the residential Digital Divide. (Affordability/availability of service to low- and moderateincome households and households with poor credit). • Attract new enterprises with high-paying jobs to region (i.e. Biomed, cyber security, corporate headquarters, and financial services). • Enable strategic partnerships between commercial providers leveraging subsea cables and data centers and anchor institutions such as colleges, universities, hospitals, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the armed forces. • Expedited service availability or arrangements to benefit economic development prospects or other community development needs. • Provide competitive and non-discriminatory access to middle-mile fiber to promote investment by commercial providers in innovative and competitively priced last-mile broadband services—the RCR is not to be used exclusively for the proposer and the Authority and its members, rather it must be available to facilitate competitive delivery of broadband services on an open access basis. • Expand accessibility to subsea cables and related localized commercial data center infrastructure. • Support broadband needs of business incubators, technology innovators, product accelerators, and data centers. • Expand advanced technology business creation and retain newly educated/skilled workforce.
