Nashville has been awarded a nearly $500,000 grant to deploy fixed wireless to homes in the Howard County seat, the Arkansas Department of Commerce announced Thursday.
The city received the grant in partnership with Premier Holdings LLC as part of a state effort to boost broadband access in underserved areas of the state.
The grant is the fourth the Commerce Department has awarded in recent weeks under the Arkansas Rural Connect broadband program. The program, in turn, received $19.3 million from the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.
The program provides grants to qualifying communities with populations of at least 500. The high-speed broadband must have a rate of at least 25 megabits per second for download and 3 megabits per second for upload.
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"The COVID-19 pandemic has provided challenges for Arkansas," Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in a news release. "However, it has also provided us a unique opportunity to deploy broadband quickly to communities."
The communities of Fairfield Bay, Lonoke and Ozark are previous grant recipients.
The department said it continues to evaluate applications with a focus on projects that can deploy broadband to qualified areas before Dec. 30, according to a news release.