Rural Broadband’s Only Hope: Thinking Outside the Box?

According to a 2017 Federal Communications Commission Broadband Deployment Report, 92 percent of the total US population has access to both fixed terrestrial services at 25 Mbps/3 Mbps and mobile LTE at speeds of 5 Mbps/1 Mbps. But for those living in rural areas, only 68.6 percent of Americans have access to both services, compared to 97.9 percent of urban dwellers."These are big challenges that call for another rural electrification administration approach. That is the scale of the problem," said Christophe Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the  Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "The reason we had initial rural electrification was because the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration, particularly a guy named Harold Ickes, who realized that the private sector would not bring good infrastructure to rural America, so they created all these co-ops." 
 
Ironically those rural electric cooperatives are building fiber networks in rural areas frequently without government help today. "If we wanted to improve rural access quickly we would focus on the electric and telephone co-ops in rural areas," he said. "Instead, the federal government is giving billions of dollars to AT&T and CenturyLink." Minnesota is making a success of pushing broadband out to its rural areas by collaborating with rural cooperatives, private providers, and a wireless pilot programs as well, said Danna MacKenzie, executive director of the Minnesota Office of Broadband Development. The state collaborates with multiplicity of providers to help it meet its goal of border-to-border coverage of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps by the year 2022. By 2026 the state hopes to supply all businesses and homes with access to at least one broadband provider of with download speeds of at least 100 Mbps/20 Mbps.