Unserved and Underserved is a distinction without a difference

Senator John Thune (R-SD) recently asked broadband stakeholders what Congress could do to improve the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act (IIJA) with respect to broadband. My suggestion: remove the meaningless distinction between Unserved and Underserved (capital “U”s), allocate money to states based on the total number of locations that are on the wrong side of the Digital Divide, and give states the tools and flexibility to blanket the underserved (lower case “u”) with good Internet. There is no difference between Unserved and Underserved. A lot of us have this expectation that very rural areas are completely Unserved, then there’s some kind of less rural segment (rural towns, for example) which are Underserved. And people that are Unserved have no access to the Internet and people who are Underserved have some kind of passable but not ideal access. None of it works like that in the real world. The most rural parts of the country are where we find most of the Unserved. That isn’t surprising. What does surprise is that we’re finding Underserved as well, at a ratio of about 2:1 Unserved: Underserved. The point: all the way up the curve as neighborhoods become denser and more Served, there’s still a mix of Unserved and Underserved. The easy approach is to remove the distinction-without-a-difference between Unserved and Underserved, do the allocation based on the combined number, and build broadband to as many of those people as we can.