Biden infrastructure plan and pandemic concerns bring more attention, possible solutions, to rural broadband gap

"Rural areas have complained for years that slow, unreliable or simply unavailable internet access is restricting their economic growth," Ben Casselman reports for The New York Times. "But the pandemic has given new urgency to those concerns, at the same time that President Biden’s infrastructure plan — which includes $100 billion to improve broadband access — has raised hope that the problem might finally be addressed."

Though many have criticized Biden for trying to expand the scope of infrastructure investment to child care, health care, and other areas beyond the traditional roads-and-bridges definition, "ensuring internet access is broadly popular," Casselman reports. "In a recent survey conducted for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey, 78 percent of adults said they supported broadband investment, including 62% of Republicans. Businesses, too, have consistently supported broadband investment. Major industry groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers have all released policy recommendations in the last year calling for federal spending to help close the 'digital divide.'"

However, it's difficult to calculate the size of the digital divide and what it would cost to bridge because there isn't a widely agreed-upon definition for broadband. "The Federal Communications Commission in 2015 updated its standards to a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per second. The Department of Agriculture sets its standard lower, at 10 mbps. A bipartisan group of rural-state senators asked both agencies this year to raise their standards to 100 mbps," Casselman reports. "And speed-based definitions don’t take into account other issues, like reliability and latency, a measure of how long a signal takes to travel between a computer and a remote server." Further complicating the problem, it's unclear which rural areas lack broadband service because the FCC relies on faulty maps containing data self-submitted by telecommunications companies. 

"Regardless of definition, analyses consistently find that millions of Americans lack access to reliable high-speed internet access and that rural areas are particularly poorly served," Casselman reports. "A recent study by Broadband Now, an independent research group whose data is widely cited, found that 42 million Americans live in places where they cannot buy broadband internet service, most of them in rural areas."

Rural community leaders trying to attract younger workers say the lack of broadband makes such campaigns difficult. Marion County, near Des Moines, Iowa, is one such area. "Our ability to diversify our economic base is dependent on modern infrastructure, and that includes broadband," Mark Raymie, chairman of the county board of supervisors, told Casselman. "We can say, 'Come and work here.' But if we don’t have modern amenities, modern infrastructure, that sales pitch falls flat."