Interview: Joseph Divis, Interim

water customers will see this offset the increase in bills.

There was substantial investment in water infrastructure in 2020. New Jersey American Water in July 2020 announced its START program to create jobs and invest in water and wastewater services. It expects to create 2,000 jobs through $150 million of annual investment. The group also invested $500,000 in improving the water infrastructure in the Delran service area, replacing over 2,600 feet of aging water mains. Suez also invested more than $140 million on infrastructure improvements in New Jersey through 2020, having carried out 170 projects in 69 municipalities.

Telecommunications Telecommunications is overseen in New Jersey by the Division of Telecommunications, which sets prices and ensures competition. The state of telecoms infrastructure was highlighted by the pandemic when millions were forced to work from home. Although New Jersey’s broadband access is first in the nation with 86% of households accessing the network and 99% connected to high-speed broadband, almost half a million people in the state still have no access to the internet. Elizabeth, Trenton and Camden have been ranked the sixth, 12th and 26th worst-connected cities in the United States. Thankfully, the digital divide is already being addressed. Federal funding from the American Rescue Plan will be allocated to expanding broadband access for rural, lowincome and moderate-income areas of New Jersey.

Transportation & logistics Transportation and logistics plays a key role in New Jersey’s economy, contributing $23 billion to GDP and providing 200,000 private sector jobs. Over 13,000 transport and logistics businesses are located in New Jersey and the South Jersey region has access to some of the major port and airport hubs globally. The Port of Newark is the largest port on the East Coast, New York’s JFK airport is the ninth-largest nationally in terms of cargo and Philadelphia International Airport is in the midst of a $90 million cargo expansion investment.

The region also has the second-densest rail and road networks in the country and over $800 billion in goods are shipped to and from sites in the state each year. The South Jersey region also has several airports of its own: Atlantic City International, South Jersey Regional, Cape May Airport, Woodbine Municipal, Millville Executive Airport and Camden County Airport.

As revenue drops from tourism hit the transportation sector hard, a substantial increase in cargo buoyed by e-commerce has served to partially offset the impact for South Jersey’s ports and airports. While the Port Joseph Divis

Interim President AT&T New Jersey

What is the state of demand for connectivity?

In a word: robust. We saw a roughly 700% increase in customer VPN connections in the first few weeks of the pandemic due to businesses shifting to a work-fromhome environment. The growth of mobile network traffic that we experienced in 2020 has accelerated an existing trend — since 2007 and through 2019, our national wireless network saw a 661,000% increase in data traffic. Data demands across AT&T networks will continue to grow; we expect consumers to use around 4.6 terabytes per month in 2025, roughly five times more data than they do today. Because of this, we’re making significant investments each year so that we are prepared to meet connectivity challenges, with this past year being the ultimate stress test on our broadband infrastructure. When you need it, you can’t build it overnight. You have to invest in it before you need it. Our preparation has allowed us to provide a foundation of connectivity for families, telehealth, education and e-commerce when needed most, and it’s not just AT&T that has been preparing. Over the past decade, there has been $1.8 trillion of private investment in America’s communication networks.

What are your expectations for South Jersey’s network connectivity?

The business community is in the midst of an evolution. Some companies may remain 100% remote postpandemic, while others will maintain a hybrid approach. We expect that the enterprise will continue to evolve with regard to its connectivity needs; consistent with that will be the need for security and robust bandwidth across all locations and all platforms. Connectivity will continue to play a vital role in quality of life and we will continue to invest in our structural infrastructure and in spectrum. The C block auction just happened, which was another mid-band block of spectrum that we will begin deploying into our networks this year and beyond. This will create more lanes for network traffic and allow us to push more 5G capability to our customers.