Heed the middle mile for rural broadband, industry leaders caution

Some $100 billion in U.S. broadband investment will be spent in rural areas before the end of the decade to close the digital divide. Yet industry leaders warn that a middle mile gap will remain if we aren’t careful. The National Telecommunication and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Middle Mile Program has made 39 awards amounting to around $980 million since it was announced in summer 2023. The total project costs were almost twice that, at about $1.8 billion. But industry leaders have long cautioned that the program likely isn’t enough on its own. If the middle mile goes ignored, the industry won’t be able to connect “all of the new last mile connections that we are planning on building in the coming four years,” said Sachin Gupta, director of Government Business and Economic Development at Centranet. Building last fiber mile networks and leaving rural markets lacking the middle mile is akin to having beautiful roads in your rural town without any real connection to the highway, he added. “We will still have a digital divide of capacity in these areas.”