Connecting the Sticks: Rural Broadband Not Up to Speed

By Sarah Burris, Rock the Trail
Posted on August 4, 2008, Printed on November 23, 2008
http://www.wiretapmag.org/arts/43661/

11-5-08 – Update! This just in from Media Alliance: We are thrilled to announce that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) voted unanimously this morning [11-4-08] to open vacant television channel spectrum (the "white spaces") to unlicensed use, which support the development of broadband and wireless technologies to increase speed and deliver access to rural and urban low-income communities poorly serviced by commercial providers. There was a furious attempt by the television broadcasters and their lobbying group (the NAB) to delay and/or scuttle this vote. This is a big win!

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If there is one thing that my friends take for granted, it's the internet. We're grateful for our computers, iPods, cell phones, iPhones and Blackberries, but we forget about the privileged ease with which we can access information online with our coveted gadgetry. In the digital age, internet access gives Millennials an edge in everything -- from staying in touch with friends to applying for college. But how likely you are to reap the benefits of access depends on where you live.

The latest Pew data (PDF) reveals that 60 percent of Americans living in urban areas have high-speed access at home. Compare that with only 38 percent of rural Americans with home broadband service and you start to understand why the United States has dropped from fourth in the world in broadband penetration to fifteenth.

According to the advocacy group Internet for Everyone (IFE), that low ranking translates into some 20 million Americans who live in areas without a single broadband provider and hundreds of millions more with only a single provider.

It is these rural regions, where users face limited options and high costs for access, that have left the US lagging behind many Asian and European countries. According to IFE, there's a lot at stake in our ranking: Improving high-speed access could translate into millions of new jobs and significantly increased economic activity.

Take Kansas as an example, a state where broadband access is less than perfect. Most cities and towns have broadband internet access but local internet providers at Lawrence Freenet say that if you stray outside the city limits you might get hosed. "Here in Lawrence," says Freenet's Josh Montgomery, "we are on our second and third generation of DSL and cable technology, so the internet access here in town gets faster and faster every year. If you step just two miles south of town," he explains, "there's no broadband internet access at all."

Connect-Ed

Access to technology and information has a direct impact on education. According to the US Department of Commerce's 2004 One Nation Online report, high-speed networks possess the power to erase geographic, economic, and cultural gaps. The report says broadband aids job searches, opens markets for small businesses, allows students to take online coursework and connects rural communities to better medical information and health care services.

Kansas has worked to provide high-speed access to schools, hospitals, and libraries with its Kan-Ed program administered by the state education Board of Regents. Many states have similar programs with their own budgets for broadband projects. But Kan-Ed Executive Director Brad Williams says they also want to expand high-speed internet access to enable real-time communications via video. Schools can use this for distance learning and hospitals can use it for tele-medicine. The speed and quality of this kind of access make it the Ferrari of internet connections.

Kan-Ed's sole focus is providing the infrastructure to deliver access to government outlets, but Williams hopes it will encourage the development of services for the community as well. Without access at home, many students can't use their computers to look up information, do research, or watch instructional videos. It also limits communication with teachers, tutors and classmates.

Josh Montgomery agrees. "If you're in high school, or even in grade school, the internet is a very important part of your educational process, and people in [well off] neighborhoods don't realize it, but in a lot of [places], especially in rural areas, there's no internet. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you live in western Kansas there is no real, true broadband internet access available to you."

Essentially, even if you can afford the Ferrari, you're stuck with the horse and buggy.

"Know" Limits

Limiting broadband internet access to schools and libraries for education is a lot like giving someone the Encyclopedia Britannica but only allowing them access to volumes A-L. There is a lot of information there, but your learning experience is still limited. Schools often use filtering systems like NetNanny, which can decrease access to sites like YouTube, online social network sites, email clients, and even stories like this.

If the purpose is to increase access to information and education for young people, limiting internet access to school hours and using inflexible filtering systems perpetuates the digital divide between students who have access and those who don't.

Most Americans living in urban areas take unfettered technological access for granted, but for rural youth, loading a graphics-laden MySpace page or application-heavy Facebook profile means endless waiting. And you can just forget about watching or uploading YouTube videos. With sites such as these among the top ten most-accessed, young people without access remain disconnected from friends and peers.

That's one reason that young Osage City, Kansas Councilman Jason Croucher is making broadband wireless access to his small downtown a priority. Osage City is a rural community that tops out at about 3,400 with only 2,500 of those within corporate limits. There isn't a shopping mall, movie theater or even an ice cream shop, but Croucher hopes their charming downtown will become the new public space for folks to hang out with laptops. "As we move into the 21st Century, tiny towns and bitty bergs have got to stay on the forefront of innovation just to keep City Hall's doors open," said Croucher via Google chat. "This is the infrastructure of the future."

Topeka, Kansas resident Dustin Hardison grew up in Mulvane, 15 minutes outside of Wichita. Hardison, a young candidate for the Kansas State House, lives in the city, though his parents still live and farm out in the country home in which he was raised. Hardison had a run-in with dial-up internet access when he bought his mom an iPod last Christmas. "She'd been going to the gym with her friends, so I thought she could get good use out of it," he explains. "I told her it was easy, she just had to go online and download a song. I think I got her a $50 gift certificate, too. Well, it took three or four hours just to download iTunes and install it."

Hardison set up her computer so that all she had to do was go online and start to download songs, but it all came to a halt when the connection would time out. "I didn't think the file size was big, because at home in Topeka I can download a song in a matter of 20 seconds. But it was taking her like an hour or more to download one song, or it would just time out."

He attributes the problem to their dial-up internet service. "Mom and Dad live just three miles outside of Mulvane which has about 5,500 people, and they don't have access to local cable. They have a satellite dish but they can't get internet through [that provider]." Hardison says there has been a lot of talk about providing high-speed internet to the area, but no one has delivered.

"They've been told the time-table is six months to a year, but that was two years ago. Now they hear that someone is going to come out and try and put something on top of the co-op and send it out to everybody, but they're still waiting," he says. "I'm not sure I could handle it if I still lived out there."

Getting Young People to Stay

Chuck Banks, state director of the USDA's Rural Development program (PDF) says that helping young people download music isn't exactly the primary purpose of building the infrastructure, but keeping youth online is part of the overall goal. "It helps with youth retention," Banks explains. "A lack of decent internet service can prove one more reason for young people to pack up and leave."

NPR's recent profile on Green County, North Carolina's efforts to bring the internet to everyone illustrates how net access impacts youth. Older people in the community weren't interested in broadband connectivity, but city leaders thought that outreach to young people would reap benefits. It began with passing out laptops to every student from sixth to twelfth grade, and requiring that parents take a one-hour computer class each week.

The result was business expansion and more students applying for college. Green County's teen pregnancy rates also dropped from second highest in the state to eighteenth. Misty Chase, who works with the county, doesn't know if she can give all the credit to laptops and broadband, but she thinks it has helped.

Future Connections

Presidential candidate Barack Obama's Plan for Rural America includes a section on investing in infrastructure like roads, bridges, locks and dams, but has no mention of broadband internet access. Republican presidential candidate John McCain's issues platform is similarly silent on the issue.

But former Congressman Jim Slattery considers rural net access a key component in dealing with the nation's high gas prices. On a recent "Rural American and the Progressive Movement" panel at Netroots Nation, Slattery said that people who are living in small towns and commuting to large cities for work are using a huge amount of their income for transportation costs. "Telecommunications are important issues; they are the future lifeline for rural America," he said. "We have to be committed to building broadband and high-speed internet into rural America."

For Slattery, internet access is as important today as railroads, telephones and electricity were in the 1930s. "If we expect people to live in small towns and small communities in Kansas," he says, "they must have broadband capability."

People in rural communities without broadband access are hindered from gaining technological skills that can improve job prospects and access to education. From learning new technical skills and applying to colleges, to more two-way communication like blogging and social networking, internet access offers users new capabilities. We no longer just passively visit websites to read or watch, but are increasingly engaging and interacting online. When it comes to politics and policy, users can act collectively with the potential to change the world.

As Zipcar and Meadow Networks founder Robin Chase observes, internet service for rural communities is a vital commodity. "Maybe it's not as basic as water, but it's as [important] as hot water."

Sarah Burris is a reporter for Rock the Trail -- a project of Rock The Vote and WireTap. She covers young local, state and federal political candidates and their legislative agendas, rural issues, Green Jobs and the environment.

© 2008 Wiretap Magazine. All rights reserved.
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