I recently had a chat with a journalist who has been covering the gaps in broadband connectivity across our country and has earned a great deal of credibility with me by actually jumping on a plane (in the good old days) and checking out some of the stories that we shared with her about NTCA members creating Smart Rural Communities across the country, powered by their broadband access.
Now, her pursuit for digital equality has become personal and I could feel her pain the last time we had the chance to talk. She lives in a beautiful, small community in the mountains of Vermont, not far from Middlebury College (of Mike Romano and Cat Moyer fame) and is lucky to be able to download emails…forget anything like streaming or VPN access. One thing she has learned from working with NTCA and some of our members as she explores the story of connectivity has been that building broadband is not a cheap proposition and that there are also physical hurdles (Vermont mountains?) that make that task even more formidable. Especially when you know enough to know you would like a FiberFast plan.
Laura Withers, our VP of Strategic Communications, and I had a chat with this reporter recently to share some reflections on lessons learned now that we are more than 6 months into a remote world – with many working from home, learning from home and even getting their medical care through an app. Now that her office was closed and her options for connectivity were limited, she joined the ranks of local school kids in nearby fast food parking lots try to complete their homework while she tried to turn in her written work. In this country, the most prosperous in the world, in 2020, realizing the hard way that having that broadband connection has become a lifeline and a necessity – and that speed and capacity actually do matter – but she cannot have it because the incumbent and competitive carriers in her area have no intention of building to her enclave even though she has fiber hubs close enough that she can almost “taste” it.
My thanks to NTCA member Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom who is not in their area but has continued to build fiber to the home extending into previously unserved communities tried to offer some counsel and advise but shared that there are no quick and easy answers and that building rural broadband is challenging and is very expensive.
The frustration and angst in her voice was very obvious as we laid out some thoughts for her to explore, including gathering her community to think about creating a communications cooperative but I think her next story that she writes on this topic will be from the heart. Her first piece profiled a rural community served by an NTCA member in Kentucky that offered a gig service and helped support the creation of jobs and development. Kind of a “can you believe that these folks here in the hollers have blazing fast Internet”? I have a feeling that her next article will be more on how American life has been impact during the Pandemic by the lack of broadband connectivity in areas of this country served by those providers who are not community based and don’t have a personal stake in being left behind.