“My Republican friends feel the same as my Democrat friends,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) tells The New Yorker‘s Sue Halpern. “They all want connectivity.”
But industry groups want their turf protected, even turf they see no economic interest in developing. The telecom industry wants to sit on unwired areas of the country like undeveloped oil leases, and state legislatures go along with them, limiting development of municipal broadband in towns that would take it on themselves.
Here’s some free advice for Joe Biden: give voters what they want.
Halpern writes:
Early on in the pandemic, Larry Irving left Washington, D.C., and took up residence in a rental property on the edge of Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, where, he soon found, the Internet service was not sufficient to run his consulting business. So Irving would drive to the local library each day and work in his car, piggybacking on the library’s Wi-Fi. More than two decades earlier, as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information in the Clinton Administration, Irving had popularized the term “digital divide” to describe the disparity between Internet haves and have-nots. “We did a series of studies that showed that if you were poor, if you were a minority, if you were elderly, and if you were rural, you were less likely to have access to the Internet,” Irving told me. “Poverty was the constant.”
Since the Clinton administration. Why do rural voters feel left behind and neglected? Maybe we need another study and another couple of decades to find out?
After Clinton, the George W. Bush administration dithered on rural broadband. S.1853 – Community Broadband Act of 2007 died in the Senate. That bill would:
- Prevent State governments from enforcing or adopting laws that would prohibit municipalities from providing broadband services
- Encourage the development of public-private partnerships to spread the use of broadband services
- Initiate notice requirements about broadband deployment to ensure the public has adequate information available to evaluate options
- Give private providers the opportunity to provide alternative broadband services
- Ensure public and private providers of broadband services are treated equally with respect to the laws, guidelines and policies that apply to all providers of broadband services
The Obama administration sent some but not enough money to the states for rural broadband.
After a dozen years, H.R.2785 – Community Broadband Act of 2019 died in committee. The short summary reads: This bill prohibits state and local entities from blocking the provision of broadband by public providers or public-private partnership providers. Further, public providers and state or local entities participating in such a partnership must administer applicable ordinances and rules without discrimination against competing private providers.
Voters remain unserved. Biden has a limited opportunity to do more than talk:
As a candidate, Joe Biden seemed to understand that appealing to rural voters was a political necessity. In his “Plan for Rural America,” Biden promised “to expand broadband, or wireless broadband via 5G, to every American.” As part of the effort, Biden promised twenty billion dollars to build rural-broadband infrastructure, as well as a tripling of the amount of money available to organizations, local governments, tribal groups, and corporations to wire rural communities through the United States Department of Agriculture’s Community Connect program. Shirley Bloomfield, the C.E.O. of the Rural Broadband Association, a national membership organization of eight hundred and fifty small local providers, was invited to join the campaign’s innovation and broadband-deployment committees. “Probably two weeks after the election, we were called in to meet with the F.C.C. transition team, with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration transition team, and the U.S.D.A. rural-development team to share our ideas and priorities,” she told me. “They hit the ground running.”
Fine. But the obstacles are the same as they were decades ago: a profit and market mentality.
In the past twenty years, population density has favored the building of Internet infrastructure in urban areas, but there has been little economic incentive to do so in many rural parts of the country. It’s a void that the covid-19 lockdown has laid bare, with so many Americans working from home, attending school using Zoom, relying on telehealth, registering for vaccination online, and, in many cases, saying a final goodbye to a loved one on a screen. Among the enduring images of the pandemic are pictures of children without broadband at home, logging on to remote classrooms from the parking lots of fast-food restaurants or the steps of shuttered elementary schools.
The problem remains unfixed. Perhaps because ideas for how to solve it remain fixed in failed models. And when federal grants are allocated, well, you can guess. The bulk goes to large, for-profit players. This is what comes from attempting to public-private-partnership your way to providing service where the profit incentive not enough (emphasis mine):
Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chair under Obama, told me that, in 2016, shortly before leaving office, he and his team put out a study showing that the cheapest way to deliver broadband was for the government to pay for it up front, the way highways and airports are financed, rather than use a convoluted subsidy program. “The analysis we did showed that for about forty billion dollars, we could deliver fiber to ninety-eight per cent of all the unconnected locations in the country,” he said. (He was quick to point out that this only solved the rural problem, not the “it goes by my house but I can’t afford it problem,” which is significant.)
The experience of Slic Network Solutions, a forty-three-person operation in the far reaches of New York State that won just under a million dollars in the R.D.O.F. auction, illustrates the challenge of funding broadband piecemeal, through grants and auctions. Two years ago, Slic received thirty-two million dollars from New York State to provide service to ninety-two hundred homes in the Adirondack Park and surrounding counties, where a dismal return on investment had scared away the bigger service providers. Kevin Lynch, Slic’s chief operating officer, told me, “Although there’s somewhat of a high capital cost to deploy initially, it’s a very long-term infrastructure investment. Think of the electric lines. Some of them have been there since the thirties. And, so, you know, over time, it will more than pay for itself and provide a great service to the rural areas. That’s why we’ve been big on it.”
Read on to see how that deal went south for Slic. Perhaps the TVA or rural electrification is a better model than trying to shoehorn for-profit ventures into unprofitable services, you know, because Markets.
Rural electrical co-ops already have the rights of way and the infrastructure in these areas. Why not incentivize them to expand their service beyond delivering electricity?