Five Rural Priorities: Rural Broadband
Author’s note: on March 2, 2022, I published my Five Rural Priorities for State Government. These are a set of nonpartisan issues for discussion in the 2022 Texas election process and beyond. This list is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, these are simply five areas that I believe to be vitally important to rural communities and their ability to prosper and thrive in the future. This is the first part of a weekly series elaborating on the five areas. If you’d like to discuss more (as an interested voter, a candidate, party leader, member of the media, or otherwise), please email me from this page.
Note: “high-speed Internet access” and “broadband Internet access” are largely used interchangeably in the basic conversations surrounding this topic, and as such, these terms may be intermingled herein.
I. Rural Broadband
A. The Problem
The good news is that everyone seems to be aware that broadband internet access is a problem. It was a topic of significant discussion in the 2021 session of the Texas Legislature. Statewide officeholders and candidates for office are talking about it. It has come up in presidential campaigns and it is a notable piece of COVID—19 and infrastructure spending legislation that passed the U.S. Congress.
The bad news is that everyone is aware, but no one has an easy set of solutions to the problem.
Nonprofit organization Connected Nation Texas (CNT) has done yeoman’s work researching the lack of broadband Internet access in Texas and is working to provide solutions to that problem. I encourage any interested party to connect with CNT’s maps and other work. CNT’s maps show that broadband Internet is available in over 95% of the State of Texas. This is based on data that is published by the FCC and service providers. That sounds great, until you dig a little deeper:
1. This availability is based on a definition of “broadband internet” as 25 mbps download/3 mbps upload speed. This is the federal government’s bare minimum legal definition of “broadband internet.” It is “high speed” in name only. It is unsuitable for anything beyond the most basic household and business applications. New high-speed internet access from most service providers is orders of magnitude faster.
2. This statistic is based on the hypothetical availability that internet service providers CAN offer the service. In many cases, those providers are not expanding service in rural areas. Service providers might profess availability in an area until a customer actually attempts to obtain service to their address. In reality, the true availability is likely much lower.
3. Lack of broadband access is disproportionately weighted towards rural Texas. CNT estimates that over 800,000 rural Texans are without broadband access. Using even the most optimistic data and the barest definition of broadband internet, that means well over 25% of the rural population in Texas is without access.
B. Why It Matters
This is a real problem that cuts to the heart of the viability and livability of many rural communities. Entertainment is rapidly moving towards streaming platforms. Even before the COVID—19 pandemic brought remote learning into thousands of households, Internet access was a necessity in education for children and adults alike. Internet is also necessary for business and job creation.
Over the years, rural broadband has been compared to the rural electrification movement of the 1930s. In that era, the United States was rapidly electrifying. Cities were modernizing and much of rural America was quickly being left behind. Rural houses and farmsteads were simply too far-flung and the expenses were too onerous for profit-minded electric utilities to string wires to serve much of rural America. At the height of the Great Depression, the federal Rural Electrification Administration (REA) stepped in. Neighbors banded together to form rural electric cooperatives and those cooperatives tapped REA’s loan programs and other resources to finance the delivery of electricity to rural America. Rural electrification was a revolution that utterly transformed the quality of life in rural communities.
There is a significant difference between electricity and broadband internet. Electricity is a static service. Once you have electricity, you have it. Internet access is ever-changing and improving. Once upon a time, dial-up internet and 3G phone service were cutting-edge technology. Today, they are insufficient to load the simplest of websites in a timely manner. Fiber-optic based internet is the technology required to connect to the “modern” world for decades to come in the manner that rural Americans connected via electricity in the 1930s.
Rural broadband has the potential to change the quality of life in revolutionary ways just like rural electrification. Entertainment and education via streaming services are simply not possible for a significant portion of rural Texas, even in 2022. That simply matters to people in a significant way. There is great demand for rural living, but without the basics of broadband Internet access, many communities cannot offer a minimum quality of life to prospective new residents.
The possibilities and pitfalls are also economic. In a more fitting analogy than electrification, broadband Internet is the 21st century version of the railroad. Like the railroads of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Internet is a necessary foundation for economic relevance and growth. Reliable high-speed Internet provides more economic options to more people and to more communities than perhaps any single technological advancement in the history of the United States. Rural communities are often struggling because they have been economically dependent on industries that are also struggling or that are far less reliant on physical labor than ever before. Rural industries simply do not need as many people as they once did, so rural communities have struggled to provide good jobs to their citizens. With broadband access, rural communities can chart a new economic path. Rural entrepreneurs can create good jobs for people with and without college degrees. A small business’s client base is no longer limited by geography. Workers can base their living decisions on their personal preferences, rather than proximity to their office. Better economic opportunities in rural communities will reduce rural poverty rates and reduce reliance on government assistance.
There is also a grim side to the analogy of the modern-day railroad. The railroad and the Internet erase distances and create new economic opportunities, but they also pick economic winners and losers. When a frontier town was bypassed by the railroad, it often withered and died. Our rural communities will wither and die without access to the modern-day railroad. There is good news, though. A railroad is a physical set of rails. When faced with the option of passing through this town or the other, a railroad could not pass through both. The railroad was forced to choose a winner and a loser in its decisions. We need not face those same choices with Internet access. The rails do not have to go through this town or the other. The rails can pass through both towns. Reliable high-speed internet can be accessible in each and every community.
C. How to Solve It
Simply throwing more money at this problem is not the solution. Substantial money and resources are available at both the state and federal levels. It is imperative that leaders marshal these resources in the most efficient manner possible. The first step is compiling data and assembling a plan. Texas has been one of only six states without a statewide broadband plan. The recently-created Governor’s Broadband Development Council is working to change that. CNT and the Texas Rural Funders are working tirelessly with local leaders to collect data and develop county-level maps that detail broadband access or lack thereof. This data is required prior to local leaders pursuing funds through USDA’s ReConnect program and other outlets for funding. Funders want to know the scope of your problem before they are willing to help you solve it and rightly so.
The next step is solving the quandary of the “last mile,” a telecommunications phrase for the physical delivery of service to the end user. To put it in layman’s terms, the last mile is the connection from your home or your business to the fiber optic line that provides Internet access. This is expensive. It requires building out infrastructure to serve each user.
This is also the most convoluted part of the equation. There are miles of fiber-optic cable in each of our communities and much of it is inaccessible to private users. Federal and state programs have delivered high-speed Internet access to schools, libraries, and other facilities and this is a wonderful thing. Citizens rightly ask why we cannot tap into that infrastructure. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the programs that funded that infrastructure, it is not legally accessible to other users. Bridging the last mile in our communities would require laying miles of fiber-optic cable in the same rights-of-way where other fiber-optic cable may already exist, which would be a wasteful and duplicative boondoggle.
In other areas, service providers may be interested in moving into a community but may be limited in their access to public rights-of-way or by the exclusivity of a service provider who is unable or unwilling to service all users within the community.
Difficult policy problems rarely have simple or singular solutions and rural broadband access is no different. First and foremost, leaders should focus on the following:
1. Support and expedite the necessary mapping, data collection, and planning at the local, county, regional, and state levels, so that those areas are able to receive funds that require maps, data, and/or planning as a prerequisite for funding;
2. Work with federal and state agencies to eliminate barriers to access for fiber-optic infrastructure that already exists within our communities and which could be tapped to serve home and business users for little or no added cost;
3. Work with existing utilities who can offer broadband Internet service using their existing access to rights-of-way (this model is already successfully occurring in many areas with electric cooperatives and cable providers adding Internet to their legacy utility service).
The awareness of the rural broadband problem has increased exponentially in recent years. The COVID—19 pandemic helped highlight both the deficiencies in Internet access in rural communities and that there is a demand for rural living that cannot be met without suitable Internet access. There are many minds much smarter than mine who are working full-time on this problem. I am grateful for each of them and I encourage you to follow their work and begin conversations with them. In the meantime, this is a summary from Stamford, Texas, of the rural broadband problem, why it matters to rural Texans, and what steps are needed in order to solve it and create a better quality of life and untold economic opportunity in every rural community in Texas.