Tyler Cooper

Broadband is emerging as a critical campaign issue for the US 2020 presidential election, and there’s good reason: nearly 60 million people in the US do not have broadband service at home. Despite this staggering fact, only four of the 14 presidential candidates we looked at have released fleshed-out policy proposals to expand broadband access (all of them democrats). On the Democratic side, broadband has become a central piece to many rural revitalization plans but as mentioned, only four candidates have released detailed broadband proposals.

Installing high-speed fiber-optic infrastructure is incredibly expensive. By some accounts, it can cost up to $8,000 per home to have the cabling put in place. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, a Federal Highway Administration report detailed that up to 90 percent of this cost was tied up in the process of actually digging up roadways, not the fiber lines themselves. As a result, some cities and states champion the idea of future-proofing PROW’s (public rights-of-ways) during road construction projects.

The lion’s share of discussion around the digital divide has centered around access, but the prices rural consumers are paying for the services available to them are worth paying attention to as well. According to our research, roughly 146 million rural Americans do not have access to a low-priced plan for wired broadband internet. That’s nearly 45 percent of the US population. We define “low-priced” as a broadband plan with a monthly cost less than or equal to the 20th percentile of all plan prices, or around $60 per month.