Digital Divide

An enterprising farmer who wants to expand his steak and dairy business but can’t reach beyond his locality. A librarian who sleeps over nights and weekends so that students can come work on projects they’ve been given online. A disabled, bedridden young woman who desperately wants to be self-sufficient but has no access to online education. Two sisters who watch their father die before their eyes because they can’t get a signal to call 911.

These are some hundreds of stories ranging from vexing to heart-rending we heard when we joined Commissioner Mignon Clyburn of the Federal Communications Commission on a journey outside of the Washington bubble last week to rural Appalachia to discuss the problems their communities face with broadband access. There, in a high school auditorium in Marietta (OH) we bore witness to seemingly countless tales of frustration, anger, and desperation from residents and elected representatives alike, from seven counties in West Virginia and eleven counties in Ohio - sentiments directed both at service providers like Frontier and AT&T (or “nonproviders,” as one man referred to them) and the Washington lawmakers charged with overseeing them in the public interest.

The Federal Communications Commission is determined to be Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing’s (TDI) partner and meet this moment. I’d like to walk through the Commission’s multi-part strategy for improving the lives of Americans with disabilities through communications technology. The first part of this strategy is pretty straightforward: to uphold our legal obligations to promote accessibility and to advance new rules when appropriate. Part two of our accessibility strategy is encouraging the private sector to make accessibility a priority, rather than an afterthought. A third way that the FCC aims to promote accessibility is to lead by example. We are seeing real success with our direct video calling program—also called DVC. Bottom line: When it comes to accessibility, the FCC is practicing what we preach. The fourth and final piece of our accessibility agenda might not strike you at first as relevant to accessibility. But our work to bridge the digital divide is critically important to Americans with disabilities. We are aiming to connect every American with digital opportunity regardless of who they are or where they live.

FiveThirtyEight analyzed every county’s broadband usage using data from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University and found that Saguache (CO) was at the bottom.

Only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband. But Saguache isn’t alone in lacking broadband. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans — 23 million people — don’t have access. In Pew surveys, those who live in rural areas were about twice as likely not to use the internet as urban or suburban Americans....Unforeseen serendipitous opportunities — summer jobs that become careers — are what motivate the county’s small internet providers to continue to pursue broadband as a public good. For now, no one in Saguache County is counting on a deus ex machina of funding from the federal government that turns universal broadband service from fantasy to reality. In real life, the practicalities wear.

Louisville (KY) has garnered much praise for an award-winning data map that visualizes the modern day effects of redlining — a practice that dates back to the 1930s, and involves racial and socioeconomic discrimination in certain neighborhoods through the systematic denial of services or refusal to grant loans and insurance.

This map, dubbed Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate, takes historic data about redlining found in the national archives in Washington (DC) in 2013 and combines it with a timeline of historic events, data about current poverty levels, neighborhood boundaries and racial demographic info. With a host of tools including buttons and sliders, users can clearly see the correlation between the deliberate injustices of the past and the plight of struggling neighborhoods today. Jeana Dunlap, Louisville’s director of redevelopment strategies, said the value of this map is wide-reaching, and that it serves to foster awareness and spur discussion of many civic challenges, including digital equity, poverty, and access to basic needs such as full-service grocery stores and health-care services.

Louisville (KY) has garnered much praise for an award-winning data map that visualizes the modern day effects of redlining — a practice that dates back to the 1930s, and involves racial and socioeconomic discrimination in certain neighborhoods through the systematic denial of services or refusal to grant loans and insurance. This map, dubbed Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate, takes historic data about redlining found in the national archives in Washington (DC) in 2013, and combines it with a timeline of historic events, data about current poverty levels, neighborhood boundaries and racial demographic info. With a host of tools including buttons and sliders, users can clearly see the correlation between the deliberate injustices of the past and the plight of struggling neighborhoods today. For Louisville CIO Grace Simrall, the map is proving an asset in the city’s ongoing work to improve digital equity. City officials have also looked at the map as lens through which to examine digital inclusion, the effort to provide all residents with equal access to technology, as well as the related skills to benefit.

Seattle’s Information Technology Department has won two awards from the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors for its efforts to foster digital inclusion within the city. The awards are:

• 2017 Community Broadband Strategic Plan of the Year, for Seattle’s Strategic Plan for Facilitating Equitable Access to Wireless Broadband
• 2017 Community Broadband Digital Equity Project of the Year, for Seattle’s Technology Matching Fund

I’m pleased to announce that August will be Rural Broadband Month at the Federal Communications Commission. Our agenda for the open meeting on August 3 will feature several items that will help bridge the digital divide.

Leading off will be a Public Notice to initiate the pre-auction process for the Connect America Fund Phase II auction. This auction will award up to $2 billion over the next decade to broadband providers that commit to offer voice and broadband services to fixed locations in unserved high-cost areas in our country. To maximize the value the American people receive for the universal service dollars we spend, this will be the first auction to award ongoing high-cost universal service support through competitive bidding in a multiple-round, reverse auction. With this Public Notice, we are seeking comment on the procedures to be used during this auction. Moving forward now will put us on track to conduct the auction in 2018.

The FCC will also consider taking the next step in implementing Phase II of another key universal service program, the Mobility Fund. In February, the Commission adopted a Mobility Fund framework to allocate up to $4.53 billion over the next decade to advance 4G LTE service, primarily in rural areas that would not be served in the absence of government support. The proposed Order on the August agenda would establish a “challenge process”—that is, a process for resolving disputes over whether areas should be eligible for Mobility Fund subsidies. This measure will allow us to proceed to a reverse auction as soon as possible. It is critical that we use accurate data to determine which areas will be included in that reverse auction. Many have complained to the FCC that the data that we currently collect through our Form 477 isn’t good enough to serve as the basis for that decision. I agree. Therefore, I am proposing to collect new and more granular data that will serve as the starting point in deciding which areas will be included in the Mobility Fund Phase II auction.

Separately, we need to do a better job collecting data through the FCC’s Form 477.

Microsoft will harness the unused channels between television broadcasts, known as white spaces, to help get more of rural America online.

In an event at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated a coast-to-coast telephone call a century ago, Microsoft plans to say that it will soon start a white-spaces broadband service in 12 states including Arizona, Kansas, New York and Virginia to connect two million rural Americans in the next five years who have limited or no access to high-speed internet. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said white spaces were “the best solution for reaching over 80 percent of people in rural America who lack broadband today.” To support the white-spaces plan, Microsoft is appealing to federal and state regulators to guarantee the use of unused television channels and investments in promoting the technology in rural areas. But the company faces many hurdles with the technology.

Microsoft said its goal was not to become a telecom provider. It will work with local internet service providers like Mid-Atlantic Broadband Communities in Virginia and Axiom Technologies in Maine by investing in some of the capital costs and then sharing in revenue. It has also opened its patents on the technology and teamed with chip makers to make devices that work with white spaces cheaper.

[Commentary] The Government Accountability Office issued a blistering report on the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to assist low-income families. The report criticized the agency for spending $1.7 billion annually without knowing — or caring — whether any of this money actually helps narrow the digital divide. I advocated that Congress eliminate the Universal Service Fund’s shady, self-funding off-budget funding mechanism and instead make it a line item in the federal budget. This would make the program more transparent and subject to greater congressional oversight, which would help reduce fraud and abuse and keep program expenses tied to a fixed budget. Overall, the GAO report points to the difficulties that the FCC has, and will continue to have, by deciding simply to extend a Reagan-era telephone subsidy to cover broadband access. Unquestionably, the government should offer assistance to low-income consumers at risk of falling on the wrong end of the digital divide. But that assistance should be designed from the ground up, tailored to the needs of the population it seeks to serve, with controls to protect against fraud and abuse. As we have argued before, Lifeline needs revolutionary, not evolutionary, change.

[Lyon is an associate professor at Boston College Law School]

When residents at San Francisco’s Hunters Point East and West low-income, federally-subsidized housing complex went online, many had access to free gigabit speed internet for the first time.

This isn’t wi-fi that’s shared throughout the building, but rather each individual unit is getting its own internet connection. Hunters Point is the first housing development to get the service, where nearly 300 people live across 212 units in 27 buildings. But by the end of 2018, more than 1,000 additional units of San Francisco income-subsidized housing will receive free gigabit internet, servicing nine more developments in the Tenderloin neighborhood and four more in the Bayview area. The internet provider behind the effort is local San Francisco outfit Monkeybrains, a company that specializes in fast internet transmitted through wireless antennas. Instead of breaking up a sidewalk to lay fiber or cables, Monkeybrains beams high-speed internet through antennas installed on rooftops. For the Hunters Point buildout, technicians are stringing cable from the rooftop antennas to connect every unit.