Inadequate service in not-so-rural areas fuels a push for nonprofit solutions.
Back in 2015, Mark Wherley drove from his home in southern Pennsylvania to nearby Westminster, Md., for a routine ribbon-cutting event. Wherley, a videographer at a nonprofit community TV station, was there to take footage of the unveiling of a new fiber-based internet network just over the state line.
Maryland officials had launched the new internet service to turbocharge connectivity in their community. Located not far from bigger cities like Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, they hoped to attract new business to a “makerspace” hub complete with its own 3D printer and faster internet speeds. Big-city commuters living in these close-in rural areas, Maryland officials reasoned, expected to stay robustly connected.
By contrast, Wherley’s home in southern Pennsylvania lacked any similar super-fast fiber. Why, Wherley asked himself, was his community in southern Pennsylvania struggling with broadband connectivity while a county down the road had fiber laid and was cutting a ribbon?
Little changed over the next few years, and then came Covid, which transformed internet connectivity into a lifeline for workers, students and anyone who needed groceries. As Wherley and his colleagues tried to set up Zoom-based meetings for local officials, he struggled with the area’s hodgepodge of spotty individual internet set-ups. Bandwidth constraints forced some residents to trade off between parents’ work Zoom meetings and children participating in remote schooling.
“The further out you get, the connection gets worse and worse,” Wherley said in an interview. “Mainly it’s lack of options that most of the residents are upset with. There’s really only one option if you want internet, and if you’re upset with that, it’s take it or leave it.”
Robin Fitzpatrick, president of the Adams Economic Alliance, described great frustration with the “black holes” of broadband inadequacy in the county that became obvious during the pandemic; the school district bought 200 Wi-Fi hotspots for students whose homes lacked adequate wired options. “We realize how vulnerable we are in many different ways,” she said.
For decades, policymakers in Washington and state capitals have fretted about the patchwork of broadband access in the United States, which has held back economic development in underserved areas and became a major problem during the pandemic, when residents in these pockets suddenly couldn’t tap into what abruptly became the online default for much of the nation.
Now, after years of federal subsidies that have improved but not solved the problem, the Biden administration is proposing to spend $100 billion over the next eight years to finally connect every American household to high-speed internet. But solving the problem isn’t just a matter of cutting a big check to fund the installation of fiber pipelines. The nation, simply put, doesn’t even know where its internet black holes are found.
Take Adams County. If you look at the county on the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband maps, it doesn’t look so bad; the map suggests that the whole county has access to at least one home internet option. The federal data, which relies on information provided by telecom companies, suggests that only about 6 percent of Adams County’s 103,000 residents don’t have access to at-home broadband.
But few residents of Adams County believe those figures, and other estimates suggest a deeper shortfall. Microsoft shared data in December, gathered anonymously from its software business, positing that 61,000 people in Adams County — roughly 60 percent — don’t use the internet at proper broadband speeds. At a fall 2019 field hearing by the House Small Business Committee, local officials testified that Adams County’s median download speeds were just 5.9 megabits per second — well below the federal government’s bare minimum of 25 Mbps.
……..
The broadband access problem in Adams County grates on Wherley and his neighbors in part because Comcast, one of the nation’s largest broadband providers, is headquartered in Pennsylvania; it’s just 120 miles from the cable giant’s corporate offices in Philadelphia to Community Media’s offices in Adams County. But Comcast doesn’t offer broadband to all parts of Adams County, which residents blame on business logic arising from a marketplace that won’t generate adequate profits for a commercial provider to build out true broadband to all residents.
Many people assume that America’s broadband problem is focused on far-flung areas, like remote stretches of Western deserts or the deep recesses of forests. But in fact, the problem is also acute in areas like Adams County, which has medium-sized cities like Gettysburg which are not very far from suburbs of cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. The market just hasn’t generated the right incentives for internet providers to serve all potential customers in areas like Adams.
Just because broadband isn’t profitable for commercial providers in Adams County doesn’t mean it’s not a necessity for its residents. So that’s why Wherley and his neighbors are convinced that what they need is a nonprofit solution.
……..
But communities that want to set up a nonprofit internet provider in Pennsylvania, and many other states, can run headlong into limitations on how much the government can be involved.
Pennsylvania is among the battlegrounds around internet connectivity because of a 2004 state law, passed after lobbying by the telecoms industry, that makes it hard for local governments to run their own broadband networks; nonprofits have more leeway but still face practical obstacles like raising the necessary capital. Maryland lacks similar restrictions and as a result has a greater number of community broadband services, such as the one in Westminster.
State laws in more than a third of the country limit the operation of municipal broadband networks. Incumbents like AT&T and Comcast argue that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be on the hook to operate such complicated internet architecture. Much better, they argue, to let the free market run the broadband world, which they contend should more efficiently deliver faster speeds and lower prices.
……..
Comcast covers the lion’s share of homes and businesses in Adams County, including areas where Community Media hopes to eventually build its fiber network, according to Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice. She said that franchise agreements with cities in Adams County generally don’t require the company to provide service in areas with density less than 30 homes per road mile. (According to a study by cable trade group NCTA, 12 percent of the United States population lives in areas with density of less than 15 homes per road mile.) Fitzmaurice said the operator’s coaxial lines in Adams County offer up to 1.2-gigabit service for downloads across the region. A second provider, CenturyLink, also provides internet access in Adams County, but it uses an older technology called DSL that isn’t as fast and also doesn’t reach all areas.
Local communities warn the reality doesn’t always jive with providers’ rhetoric, and the global pandemic created new urgency to deliver reliable, fast network connections. Technologies like 5G, which connects users wirelessly but still relies on a fiber network, has also encouraged rural areas like Adams County to press for fiber, even if a nonprofit, cooperative or local government has to take up the mantle.
The Biden administration is also thinking this way and has prioritized municipal and nonprofit broadband as part of the White House’s infrastructure plan, which includes $100 billion aimed at connecting the whole of the U.S. to high-speed internet over the course of eight years. Biden’s plan “prioritizes support for broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives—providers with less pressure to turn profits and with a commitment to serving entire communities,” the White House said in April.
……..
Scores of local governments, as well as cooperatives and nonprofits, have attempted to set up their own broadband networks over the years, leading telecoms and other internet providers to push for state restrictions like the law in Pennsylvania. An Obama-era regulatory push to preempt such state roadblocks failed in court, but some see an opportunity to slip such a provision in Biden’s multitrillion-dollar infrastructure legislation given a groundswell of community interest. This May, for instance, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law undoing municipal broadband restrictions.
……..
And these fights are taking places in both rural and urban areas, some of which have suffered from “digital red-lining” in low-income areas where service can be poor and prices out of reach for residents.
……..
Manufacturers are warning Adams County officials that they need better connectivity in order to facilitate the automation they need to stay competitive, according to Fitzpatrick, the Adams Economic Alliance head. Local farmers carry two cellphones as a means of trying to hold at least one signal in parts of the region with weak connectivity. And although tourists come through Gettysburg to visit nearby Civil War battlefields, she thinks better connectivity is essential to draw younger generations of visitors in the coming years.
……..
Right now, Community Media is trying to pull together $3 million for the first phase of its network plans, which would serve about 1,200 homes throughout Adams County. The project leaders cite a good deal of upfront expenses, with planning studies running as much as $50,000. They already won some grant money over the last two years and worked with firms to complete a feasibility study. Engineers have given estimates it’ll cost $15,000 to $30,000 per mile to lay fiber-optic cable. The total cost for the county may wind up ranging between $50 million to $100 million, Gouker estimated.
……..
The community media advocates in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, say they’re agnostic on how much government is involved, if at all. They say they just want broadband.
“I like the idea of local people taking care of their own and keeping the money in the county,’’ said Gouker, “rather than having the government give the money to big corporations to do the things that they should have done.”
- Discussion
-
The Biden administration is proposing to spend $100 billion over the next eight years to finally connect every American household to high-speed internet. But solving the problem isn’t just a matter of cutting a big check https://t.co/UI6AzY1VlT
— POLITICO (@politico) June 3, 2021
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.