Rural Broadband’s Only Hope: Thinking Outside the Box?

The American landscape of broadband in rural areas is spotty at best. It is a picture covered with splotches of color. Some maps are covered with red indicating there is no service; and other maps are covered in blue where access can be found. In states like North and South Dakota, officials have done their best to give their populace fiber to the home.Then there are areas where the state government has worked hard to provide grants and a flexible network of private and local not-for-profit organizations to build out coverage slowly. An excellent example of this would be Minnesota where 117 providers have come together to build infrastructure in the name of economic development.Then there is the vibrant area of broadband build out that is headed by rural electric cooperatives. Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to bring electricity to rural areas when privately owned companies were not building out to farms and ranches. The act allowed electricity to rural areas through cooperatives, many of which still exist today. These member-owned co-ops purchased power on a wholesale basis and electricity was distributed on a network of their building. Many government experts see this model as a potential saving grace for Internet in rural areas.But there are still areas that have nothing to tether them to the modern world at all. These areas are not just rural, but geographically challenging to traverse and connect. Oregon is one of these states. Geographically the eastern part of the state is cut off from the coast by the Cascade Mountains."These are big challenges that call for another rural electrification administration approach. That is the scale of the problem," he said. "The reason we had initial rural electrification was because the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration, particularly a guy named Harold Ickes, who realized that the private sector would not bring good infrastructure to rural America, so they created all these co-ops."Ironically those rural electric cooperatives are building fiber networks in rural areas frequently without government help today. "If we wanted to improve rural access quickly we would focus on the electric and telephone co-ops in rural areas," he said. "Instead, the federal government is giving billions of dollars to AT&T and CenturyLink."