U.S. telecom infrastructure deficiencies inaccurately described as "rural broadband" problem

Neighborhood broadband data makes it clear: We need an agenda to fight digital poverty: The digital gap between urban and rural parts of the country tends to garner the most attention. However, our analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) data tells another story: The majority of digitally disconnected households live in metropolitan areas, and the gaps are especially large when comparing neighborhoods within the same place. Effectively, some residents live in digital poverty even as their neighbors thrive.

Poor connectivity within metro areas has not gotten the attention it deserves, particularly as their residents seek more affordable housing in more distant suburbs and exurbs that typically lack modern fiber to the premise #FTTP telecom infrastructure. Much of the media narrative instead is based on a circa 1950 version of the United States. At that time, residential settlement was much more binary, divided among urban and rural areas. This has also led to outdated and inaccurate comparisons of poor "rural broadband" to lack of electric power and telephone infrastructure in rural areas in the early part of the 20th century.

When one premise has advanced telecom service and another nearby does not, it's not a "rural broadband" issue

Electric coops could end Mississippi's broadband 'deserts': What’s considered a “broadband desert” can be deceptive. My elderly parents, for example, live in a rural area between two cities that are served by broadband, but still can only get basic dial-up services. People just up the road can receive broadband from AT&T, and when we recently inquired about services, AT&T looked up the address, assured us they could help and dispatched a technician. But when the tech showed up and tried to install the equipment, he apologetically explained that the home was just out of reach. He was sympathetic to my parents’ plight, and it wasn’t his fault, but it was just not happening.

This account illustrates why America's advanced telecom infrastructure deficiencies cannot accurately be described as a "rural broadband" problem as it's typically dubbed in both mainstream and info tech media. As has been the case for at least a decade as reported on this blog, the problem is redlining by legacy incumbent ISPs with no universal service requirement as exists for traditional voice telephone service. One premise is offered service while another nearby is not. That wasn't the case with electric power distribution infrastructure in the early 20th century. That was truly a rural issue since rural areas were bereft of electric power service.

U.S. doesn’t have a definitive “rural broadband” problem; it’s all about service area “footprints” and redlining

In the first part of the 20th century, U.S. policymakers appropriated funding to cooperatives and local governments to bring electrical and telephone service to rural America. As the century got underway, these utilities were offered only in cities – where investor-owned providers deemed them sufficiently profitable to build the necessary distribution infrastructure.

Many similarly describe the nation’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies as a rural issue as it was for these utilities. It’s not that simple. True, the deficits tend to be greater in rural areas. But it’s not purely a matter of rural geography as it was many decades ago. Back then, entire rural regions lacked electric power and telephone infrastructure.

The situation today is different and more nuanced. Legacy telephone and cable companies first began offering always on “broadband” services using existing infrastructure starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was offered not as a general telecommunications service, but as a premium “high speed” add on service in highly localized “footprints” in urban, suburban, exurban and rural areas compatible with their business models. Those models generally require capital build costs to be recovered in five years or less.

These highly granular "footprints" and the redlined areas outside of them -- passed over due to long durations to ROI and insufficient profit potential relative to the cost of building out infrastructure – cannot be compared to the large rural regions that lacked electrical and telephone service in the early 20th century. Consequently, building out advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the 21st century cannot be undertaken with a 1920s or 1930s perspective, framing it simply as a “rural broadband” issue.

Hence, the inability of “rural broadband” subsidy programs to close the gaps. Rural electrification and telephone subsidy programs were the right approach for their time. But that context does not easily translate to the complexities of modern advanced telecommunications infrastructure. Other factors beyond rurality come into play such as the number of occupied premises per mile of landline infrastructure and average income levels. The former trumps the latter as many high income homeowners in exurban areas without access to landline service can attest.

Hillary Clinton gets it: U.S. does not just have a "rural broadband" problem

It's a well established management and planning axiom that effectively addressing a problem or issue relies upon a clear definition of the problem. When it comes to modernizing its telecommunication infrastructure and addressing infrastructure disparities, it's too frequently imprecisely defined as a "rural broadband" issue.

That papers over the fact the United States suffers from very uneven deployment of advanced telecommunications infrastructure in all areas: rural, exurban, suburban and urban. In short, the U.S. doesn't only have a "rural broadband" problem. It has significant, widespread gaps and incomplete infrastructure everywhere in the nation. It's folly to define the issue purely based on geography.

Finally that realization is beginning to register with public policymakers and office seekers as illustrated in a speech this week by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton:

You know, I happen to think we should be ambitious. While we're at it, let's connect every household to broadband by the year 2020. It's astonishing to me how many places in America not way way far away from cities but in cities and near cities that don't have access to broadband. And that disadvantages kids who are asked to do homework using the Internet; 5 million of them live in homes without access to the Internet. So you talk about an achievement gap, it starts right there. (Emphasis added)

Excerpt courtesy of Newsweek. Full transcript here.

U.S. does not just have a "rural broadband" problem; Bold federal initiative needed to address widespread infrastructure disparities

In these troubling times, senators unite to end America's big divide – rural v urban broadband • The Register: The US Senate has formally formed its first informal committee to push for better broadband in America's countryside. The bi-partisan Senate Broadband Caucus will be made up of five senators who represent states with large rural populations and will push for laws that help to expand high-speed internet service into those underserved markets. The caucus will initially comprise of Senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), John Boozman (R-AR), Angus King (I-ME), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). Each comes from states where large tracts of uninhabited land make the installation of fiber networks financially unappealing to commercial providers.

This would be fine if disparate access to modern telecommunications infrastructure was solely a rural issue as electrical power distribution infrastructure was at the start of the 20th century when entire rural counties and regions were left off the grid.

The problem is it's not. Driven by cherry picking and redlining by legacy telephone and cable companies, access disparities tend to be far more granular, occurring in rural, suburban, exurban and even urban areas. Neighborhoods and clusters of premises may be served by landline internet infrastructure while others just a mile or two distant -- or even less -- are not.

That's not a "rural broadband" problem. It's a national crisis of deficient telecommunications infrastructure for the 21st century. The United States needs a bold federal initiative to ensure fiber optic connections to every American doorstep and institution and to replace legacy metallic infrastructure. And in the shortest possible time frame given the task should have been started a generation ago. I present the case and outline how it would work in my recent eBook Service Unavailable: America's Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis.

California telecom infrastructure deficiencies concentrated in metro central, north valley counties

The large bulk of California’s deficient access to landline advanced telecommunications infrastructure manifests in the state’s central and north valley regions, concentrated in counties designated by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as urban metro counties.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. http://www.ers.usda.gov/datafiles/Rural_Definitions/StateLevel_Maps/CA.pdf

The below state map produced by the Central Coast Broadband Consortium (h/t to Steve Blum of Tellus Venture Associates) shows areas designated by the California Public Utilities Commission as unserved and underserved for landline advanced telecommunications infrastructure are concentrated in and around the Central Valley municipalities of Modesto and Fresno, in the Sierra Nevada foothills east and northeast of the state capital of Sacramento in Placer and El Dorado counties, and up the Interstate 5 corridor in Sutter, Butte and Yuba counties to the Shasta County seat of Redding in far northern part of the state.

These are not sparsely populated areas as shown by the map’s legend, which indicates a large presence of census blocks with populations of 150 to 300 people per square mile (designated as orange) and more than 300 per square mile (designated as red). By definition, a portion of these census block areas is not even considered rural (population density of less than 250 per square mile) by the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission relative to the availability of medical services.

Source: Central Coast Broadband Consortium. http://map.centralcoastbroadbandconsortium.org/
Accessed February 14, 2016

 

The takeaway is America’s telecommunications infrastructure deficits and disparate access cannot be necessarily be described as a “rural broadband” issue, particularly when looking at the nation’s most populous state. The operative "R" word here is these areas have been redlined for telecom infrastructure modernization as have similar areas throughout the United States.

FCC report finds broadband deployments still too slow | Politics and Law - CNET News

Roughly 19 million Americans still don't have broadband Internet, according to a report released Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission.

This is the eighth year that the FCC has issued the report, which is a requirement of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. And for the third year in a row, the agency has found that broadband service is not being rolled out in a "reasonable and timely fashion." Still, the report sees an improvement over the year before, when the FCC found that 26 million Americans lacked broadband.

About 14.5 million of the 19 million Americans without broadband live in rural areas, according to the report. The FCC has been working to remedy the issue. Earlier this year, the FCC converted a $4.5 billion fund for rural telephone service into a fund that will subsidize expansion of broadband access.

And this doesn't just apply to rural areas.  There are plenty of people living in metro areas of the U.S. and exurbs lacking fast, dependable wireline Internet connectivity.

After eight years of these reports that basically say the same thing, one might conclude that rural Americans are getting the message that the incumbents aren't going to serve their needs and they'll have to form telecom cooperatives just as their predecessors did several decades ago.  As Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance so aptly put it, "Help is NOT on the way."  Not unless you and your neighbors help themselves.

Rural U.S. mired on Internet dirt road

The Calix U.S. Rural Broadband Report not surprisingly found rural United States remains a copper-paved dirt road of Internet access where it has remain mired for years: 

The rumored slow pace of life in rural America may be
giving way to faster broadband speeds, but rural areas
clearly started from farther behind. The most common
peak downstream broadband rate consumed by endpoints
in rural America was between 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps in
Q1 2012. During the quarter, 60% of rural broadband
subscribers received a maximum downstream broadband
speed of 3 Mbps or less – approximately one-eighth of the
U.S. peak downstream average published by Akamai in its
most recent published ”State of the Internet” report. In fact,
71% of rural subscribers received a downstream broadband
speed that was slower than the target for the Connect
America Fund (CAF) of 4 Mbps, and approximately 90%
fell below the CAF upstream target of 1 Mbps. Upstream
rates remained slow as well, with 95% receiving 1.5 Mbps
or less.

Colorado bill first step in state investment in Internet infrastructure

Government Technology has an article today on legislation introduced in the Colorado Legislature that the author, Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, describes as a first step toward the state investment in Internet telecom infrastructure shunned by private sector providers:

Schwartz said the intent of the Rural Broadband Jobs Act is to help Colorado improve access to broadband so that businesses throughout the state have opportunities to be competitive and successful.

“I am looking for a definitive assessment of underserved and unserved areas in our state that lack broadband access,” Schwartz said in an interview with Government Technology. After those areas are defined and as funding becomes available, she’d like the state to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring broadband to those underserved locations.

Click here to read Colorado Senate Bill 12-129, CONCERNING ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE BROADBAND INTERNET CONNECTIVITY IN NONCOMPETITIVE RURAL AREAS.

Post Office says Internet forces closings, but affected residents remain offline

Geoff Brim sent along this Reuters piece that highlights an odd irony. The U.S. Post Office is shuttering offices in rural areas, blaming the Internet for putting them out of business. But the residents of these areas are scratching their heads since so many of them remain disconnected from the Internet due to lack of wired infrastructure. As the article explains:

Internet access has spread the way most businesses expand - to areas more densely populated with people willing to pay for service. Today, rural areas remain less connected to the Internet than urban populations across every technology type, according to Commerce Department data. Nearly 90 percent of the 24 million Americans without wired broadband access live in rural areas, latest data show.

"There's still a real digital divide between rural and urban America," said Ed Luttrell, president of the National Grange, which represents rural America. "You look at rural folks, they tend to rely much more heavily on the Postal Service for delivery of a wide variety of necessities than urban people."

Last mile fiber project lands broadband stimulus award, sparks strong interest from other rural electric coops

Telecommunications equipment manufacturer Pulse is reportedly getting deluged with inquiries from rural electric cooperatives after it successfully partnered with a rural electric cooperative in Northeast Missouri to score $19 million in last mile broadband stimulus funding from the USDA's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).

What's sparking (pun intended) interest in the Ralls County Electric Cooperative project is its fiber to the premises design that utilizes "distributed tap architecture" for easy deployment of drops that's cost effective at population densities of as few as four homes per mile, reports Light Reading's Cable Digital News.

The take away from this story isn't about the technology alone. It shows there is tremendous interest in the cooperative business model to bring advanced telecommunications services to unserved and underserved areas of the United States just as coops did a century ago when rural electric and other utility cooperatives were first formed.

What it's like inside a real rural broadband black hole

When it comes to the shortcomings of U.S. broadband infrastructure, mainstream media tend to paint with too broad a brush by describing the issue in stark urban and rural terms as if American settlement patterns were still like those of the 1930s and 1940s.

They also inaccurately reinforce stereotypes that people in urban areas have access to broadband while those in rural areas often don't. Wrong. There are plenty of folks in the semi-rural America, the exurbs, suburbs and even some in Silicon Valley who lack wireline advanced telecommunications services due to incomplete infrastructure buildout over the last mile.

The difference is in rural areas, the broadband black holes tend to cover far larger geographical areas. Here's an excerpt from an article in USA Today that describes what it's like inside one of those truly rural broadband black holes:

"A lot of people think rural America is where the road narrows from four lanes to two lanes," says Cubley, who grew up on a farm in East Texas. "Rural America is where you drive off the gravel road to get to the farm house; it's where you have to get in a car and drive to visit your neighbors," he says. "Millions of people live that way. And they need broadband just like everybody else."

Tim Nulty attacks conventional thinking on rural fiber, broadband mapping

Here are two reports on a panel discussion held last week in Washington DC hosted by the Benton Foundation.

In both accounts, Tim Nulty -- who's making fiber to the premises a reality in Vermont -- stands out. Nulty trashes as "nonsense" conventional wisdom that there's little demand for fiber in less densely populated areas of the U.S. and that a business case can't be made for it in this dispatch by ars technica's Matthew Lasar:

"The standard traditional wisdom is 'Oh no you can't do that; impossible,'" Nulty noted. "'Can't make fiber work in rural areas. You've got to use some half-baked technology like WiFi or something like that." Au contraire, he told the audience. "It's actually significantly easier and cheaper to do fiber today than it was to do copper when our forefathers did it in the thirties."

And Nulty's right on the money when he suggests broadband mapping is nothing but a time wasting paper chase charade that makes incumbent telecommunications providers appear to be doing something instead of actually getting fiber on and in the ground. Nulty said this at the Benton event according to Blandin on Broadband:

Sometimes these maps are used to postpone action. A map of 200K access is not that helpful. In Vermont we had towns that were officially served – but ask people if they are served and they say no. The maps help get the incumbents off the hook. Access to info is good – but not if it distracts from promoting activity.

Trend: Rural telcos move to fiber

Two years ago, only about 12 percent of rural telcos were utilizing fiber to the home (FTTH) and/or fiber to the curb (FTTC) to offer broadband to customers. Last year, that number had grown to 28 percent. It now stands at 32 percent, according to surveys of members of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, and the vast majority of survey respondents (84 percent) already utilize fiber fed nodes to extend the reach of their digital subscriber line service.

U.S. Dept. of Agriculture revamps rules for funding rural broadband projects

Dorr outlined several key elements of the proposed rules: Promoting deployment to rural areas with little or no service; Ensuring that residents in funded areas get broadband access more quickly; Limiting funding in urban areas and areas where a significant share of the market is served by incumbent providers; Clarifying and streamlining equity and marketing survey requirements; Increasing the transparency of the application process, including legal notice requirements, to make more informed lending/borrowing decisions; Promoting a better understanding of all application requirements, including market survey, competitive analysis, business plan, and system design requirements; and ensuring that projects funding are keeping pace with increasing demand for bandwidth.

Dorr noted that significant progress has been made in facilitating rural broadband deployment since the program began. Over 70 loans have been made totaling $1.2 billion for broadband deployment projects headquartered in 36 states. Through these loans, more than half a million households in more than 1,000 rural communities will receive broadband service. Over 60% of these communities had little or no broadband service at the time.