Op-Ed

While COVID-19 has highlighted the deficiencies in broadband availability in the homes of our school-age kids around the country, the absence of a broadband connection for our older adults is equally concerning. Lack of internet access sets the stage for growing isolation and harm to our seniors across the country. Although broadband adoption has increased among those 65 and older in recent years, there is still a significant gap. A 2017 Pew Research revealed that over half of those 65+ have a broadband connection at home, and about 67 percent use the internet.

The European Union has embraced a heavy-handed regulatory scheme designed to allocate access to the existing network, while the US has emphasized private investment to expand network capacity. As the internet emerged and developed, the work of European regulators was guided by the legal system developed to govern traditional telephone service largely built with taxpayer funds. This approach presumed that significant parts of the phone network were likely to remain monopolies.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s emergence and exponential spread has highlighted the mission-critical nature of residential networks. Home networks are now lifelines, connecting us to colleagues, customers, co-workers, patients and investors, not to mention friends, family and entertainment. Many more people would be unemployed or be contributing less to the economy if not for this connectivity. Data shows that demand for downlink bandwidth in areas affected by the pandemic have risen on average by 30% and uplink bandwidths by 50%-100%.

The current global response to COVID-19 would not have been possible without telecommunications. But we need more innovation in telecommunications to build the medical infrastructure we need to deal with pandemics. society will need tools to better prepare for future pandemics that can arrive more frequently and be even more deadly than COVID-19. Possible ideas include:

As we wrap our heads around the new normal of sheltering in place and trying to care for those in our communities that are truly devastated by COVID-19, the technologies that connect us – from the internet to wireless to GPS – are now the first line of contact and defense for nearly everything we do. Information and communications technologies have created a remarkable ability to connect, inform, work remotely and innovate. While these capabilities benefit the world in a wide range of ways, their benefits are not distributed equally.

The main barrier to broadband deployment in rural areas is not government regulation but simple economics. Rural areas with low population densities cannot provide fast enough returns on investment to satisfy the requirements of for-profit companies. Local governments, such as townships, have little to no control over any regulations that would have any effect on broadband deployment costs.

There’s no such thing as a “new” idea, said Mark Twain. In the Federal Communications Commission World there really isn’t because someone thought of almost every great new idea 50 years earlier. That someone was the FCC world’s Visionary-in-Chief, former FCC General Counsel and National Telecommunications & Information Administration Director Henry Geller. On April 7, at the age of 96, Henry passed away. Who in their field has matched what Henry accomplished in ours? Irving Berlin (songs). James Brown (dances). Abe Lincoln (oratory).

When I moved to Drain (OR) population 1,169, I did so because it was my dream to buy a small farm and land is cheaper here than in larger towns. What I didn’t realize was that in rural America, internet options are often limited. Now that the libraries and businesses I used to rely on for internet have closed, the threads of connection I clung to before have been taken away. I cannot rent DVDs. I cannot go to the library to work. Even cruising grocery store aisles is a bad idea.

Telehealth can play a vital role in keeping more Americans healthy and easing the stress on the capacity-strained health care system.

Internet providers stepping up in the midst of this crisis to maintain affordable service is the right thing to do in this moment—but it’s a short-term fix for a decades-long problem. To truly close the digital divide, cities and states (and Congress if needed) should follow the playbook from the 1930s, and from the many communities—red and blue, urban and rural—who have brought high-speed internet to all residents: