Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance Buy-Down Worksheet

Overview:

The Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance worked with Virginia Interactive in 2008 to create a collaborate section within their current website, offering their users a wizard like tool that would present a series of questions and calculate potential deployment costs for affordable, accessible broadband services.

Description:

The purpose of this Buy-Down Worksheet is to help identify and quantify the amount of "publically-influenced" funds that exist within a jurisdiction or broadband project area.

Benefits:

• Time 
  Efficient - Encouraging community led (public private partnership) broadband initiatives is a family-friendly, business-friendly public policy that expedites deployment and reducing costs. The Buy-Down Worksheet serves as a key success factor for the costs associated with planning and deploying broadband in unserved areas. The user easily and quickly answers questions through a series of screens in a matter of minutes without having to do any manual calculation. If the user should need to stop before the worksheet has been completed, the changes are automatically saved and can be edited if changes need to be made at a later date.
  
  
• Money 
  No mailing costs – The Buy-Down worksheet is completely web-based and eliminates the need for the Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance to mail worksheets.

• “Green”
  No more travel - Promoting the deployment of affordable broadband services also reduces strain on transportation infrastructure by allowing citizens to participate in telework and other online activities rather than having to drive to a particular location.  Citizens’ travel habits and transportation choices can affect global climate change.  By eliminating the daily roundtrip commute, we could save nearly an hour (52 minutes) and 30 miles of driving each day.  This equates to some big gas savings. The average American commuter drives a sedan that gets roughly 20 miles per gallon. He or she would use 1.36 gallons per day or 6.8 gallons per week. If the 40% of employees who could work from home did so half of the time (approximately the national average) it would reduce Gulf Oil dependence by almost 60% and save Americans $40 billion at the pumps. 
  

Links:

 
Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance Buy-Down Worksheet:  http://funding.otpba.vi.virginia.gov/Default.aspx

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