THE BATTLE FOR THE INTERNET IN RURAL AMERICA

[mfcorey1]

So much of Blacksburg is made up of Virginia Tech. But drive 15 minutes in any direction and this emerging tech hub of a town gives way to rural, rolling plains of farmland. That geographic divide also marks a digital wall between internet haves and have-nots — one fiercely felt along the 40-mile stretch between Blacksburg and Roanoke, a city of 100,000-plus people whose broadband speeds are slower than those found in the capital of Latvia.

A similar digitally divided drama is playing out across America, as access to high-speed internet becomes the great infrastructure opportunity of this century — and a challenge, perhaps, even more pressing than the “crumbling” highways, bridges and airports that President Donald Trump has promised to address. Broadband is “taking its place alongside water, sewer and electricity as essential infrastructure,” the Broadband Opportunity Council declared under President Barack Obama. And it manifests itself along the fault lines of the American experience: Former state auditor Adam Edelen, founder of the left-leaning New Kentucky Project, called it “a precondition, something you have to have.” That was after he toured the state and watched how McDonald’s in rural parking lots would fill up around school-pickup time as parents and their children scrambled to check the internet and download homework assignments before heading home to slow, or nonexistent, connection speeds.


http://www.ozy.com/politics-and-power/the-battle-for-the-internet-in-rural-america/75685

[guillaumeb]

1. But they can listen to Limbaugh and FOX.

That is all they need.

Recommended.

[msongs]

2. internet needs to be some form of public utility. dems could run on this issue nt

[gladium et scutum]

6. So the solution to the problem

is to make the Internet dependent on the political party in charge of Congress and the White House. Probably not a bad idea if we could hope that Democratic officials control these offices. Probably not a good idea with those other people in charge of the Federal Government. JMO

[TexasProgresive]

3. I have little hope that HSI will come at an affordable price to rural people.

The reason we have electricity and land line telephones was the REA. There was also an agreement that the telephone companies had a "Regulated" monopoly which required them to give service to anyone who requested it. The pricing structure that allowed for this was, long distance subsidized local, business subsidized residential and urban subsidized rural.

There is no way a company is going to spend the money to serve rural customers when there is no chance of a return. It takes something like the above to make it happen; the force of law to make them and a way to actually recoup the losses. This is assuming that a connected country is stronger than one which has large swaths left out.

[Elwood P Dowd]

4. We need something like FDR's REA, now RUS. Part of the USDA.

I live in the boonies of the southeast US and get 65 Mbps speeds, but just a few miles away you're stuck with dial up or almost as slow DSL.

[hunter]

5. I would have been happy to read the article but it committed a grave sin of web design...

... in my book, anyways. Javascript popups are loathsome. I immediately exit any site that does that. I used to play around with filters to eliminate them, or block javascript on sites I haven't visited before, but now I just exit sites that do that. It's a damned irritating way to monetize a site and collect email addresses.

But yeah, the rural internet problem needs to be approached in the same way rural electrification was. It could even be done with new wireless bands, perhaps using television frequencies that will never be fully utilized in very rural areas.

My great grandparent's ranch is about as far away as you can get in these 48 states from the nearest MacDonalds or Wal-Mart, but they got electricity and telephone thanks to FDR's New Deal, as part of the Rural Electrification Act.

My great grandma was still complaining about electricity when I was a kid, mostly that she thought it was an indulgence by my great grandfather to support his radio habit. But he also made some money beyond the ranch business working as an occasional lineman, especially in the winter when storms knocked lines down. Local jobs and training were part of the deal.