Individuals who primarily Reside in a Rural Area

Residents of a St. Landry Parish (LA) town say they were recently left without internet for five days while getting no answers from the service provider after a line was inadvertently cut. On July 11, some Sunset residents noticed they weren't receiving emails and web pages refused to load. Residents took to Facebook to find out that all Brightspeed customers in their community were without internet. Customers were not notified about the outage, several residents said, and calls to Brightspeed’s customer service yielded little in the way of information.

Land O'Lakes (yes, the butter company) is bridging the digital divide in the rural US. During the height of COVID, Land O’Lakes expedited its budding plans to help close the broadband access gap in rural America, said Vice President of rural services Tina May. As a cooperative owned by around 1,700 farmers, Land O’Lakes is situated in over 10,000 rural communities in the US, touching about half of the harvested acres in the country. In 2020 Land O’Lakes collaborated with local partners in rural, low-access areas to set up free Wi-Fi in parking lots.

One of the things that I don’t hear discussed enough is that some of the internet service providers (ISP) chasing rural broadband grants have high broadband rates. I’m curious how much emphasis State Broadband offices will put on the retail rates of grant applicants when evaluating grant winners. The two most easily identified ISPs with high broadband rates are Charter and Comcast. Charter rates for standalone basic broadband are now over $90 in many markets, and Comcast is nearing $100 per month.

Recently I wrote about how there are too many locations in the National Broadband Map when you compare it with the recently-released Census count of housing units. In rural areas, there are 30.1 million housing and business units according the National Broadband Map, and 24.6 million housing units according to the Census. This isn’t just academic.

There are currently 291,000 locations in Minnesota that are either unserved or underserved, which is about 12 percent of homes or businesses. The state would like to fill in those gaps by 2026. An infusion of $67 million in grants allocated during the last legislative session will put a dent in that need. Federal funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, totaling $652 million over five years, allocated to Minnesota will go even further to bringing high-speed internet to all Minnesotans. US Sen.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and colleagues reintroduced the PRESERVE Online Speech Act. This bill would combat censorship coordination between big tech companies and governments by requiring technology companies to disclose any US or foreign government requests or recommendations regarding content moderation. Specifically, this bill would: 

The Iowa Office of the Chief Information Officer issued Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) #008 for the Empower Rural Broadband Grant Program making available up to $148,960,000 for broadband expansion in Iowa. The purpose of this NOFA is to solicit applications from Communications Service Providers for Broadband Infrastructure Projects that will have the greatest overall effect of reducing or eliminating Eligible Unserved or Underserved Locations in the State through the installation of Broadband Infrastructure.

The broadband industry of late has been buzzing with excitement after the White House revealed how much each state is getting from the $42.5 billion Broadband Access, Equity and Deployment (BEAD) program. Some states—like California, Texas and Missouri—bagged sizable BEAD allocations.

I celebrated my thirteenth anniversary back at NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association in this role leading the best association team and the most exciting industry. I spent 20 years at NTCA after working on Capitol Hill and loved everything about the membership that the organization represented. At the time I started (in the dark ages, per my daughters), our mission was about bringing telephone service to rural Americans.

Even before he took office Governor Phil Murphy (D-NJ) realized that access to high-speed internet is now a prerequisite for participation in our increasingly connected economy. One of the Murphy administration's first priorities was to create a middle-mile, fiber-optic cable network to connect New Jersey’s rural and urban communities to high-speed internet. In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic shined a spotlight on technology and connectivity gaps.