In 2009, as the United States faced a serious banking crisis, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It appropriated $4.7 billion in funding for the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration to fund “middle mile” networks—in other words, to expand broadband access across the country.
Nearly every federal department supports some form of “broadband,” and yet, communities across the country continue to lack access to high-speed Internet.
In 2015, the U.S. government committed $1.49 billion over ten years through the FCC’s Connect America Fund to provide fixed-broadband Internet and voice services to more than 700,000 locations in forty-five states. AT&T was awarded $428 million in annual funding over six years, or nearly $3 billion in total, to bring high-speed Internet service to 2.2 million customers in eighteen states, including Wisconsin, Mississippi, Texas, and California.
But Jeff Hallstrand, a county supervisor in Price County, Wisconsin, says his home Internet speeds are at the same level today as they were in the 1990s. “The Internet that’s at my place today was installed twenty years ago,” he says. For Wisconsin, the FCC awarded three companies more than $570 million—CenturyLink $330 million, Frontier Communications $186 million, and AT&T $54 million to upgrade Internet service at 230,451 locations.
For Mississippi, AT&T received $283 million to extend wireless broadband to 133,000 locations by the end of 2020. In September 2020, the three members of Mississippi’s Public Service Commission accused AT&T of “submitting false data” and asked the FCC to investigate. “We feel it is our duty to alert you to this issue,” the PUC wrote.
The current all-inclusive category of “broadband” covers allocations estimated at about $650 billion. Additional allocations come through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021, and the American Rescue Plan of 2021.
Nearly every federal department supports some form of “broadband,” and yet, communities across the country continue to lack access to high-speed Internet.
Christopher Ali, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, says “the major reason why this spending has not solved the digital divide is that we’ve had a policy system that has favored the larger incumbent providers. We’ve trusted the largest telecommunications companies to connect the country and they’ve failed miserably.”
“Part of the problem,” says Christopher Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, “is that much of the funding has been allocated for multiple purposes.”
“It could be used for broadband, but most states will use it for water infrastructure or to make up for worker salary cuts during the pandemic,” he says. “There is a difference between monies allocated from programs that can only be spent on broadband-related things and monies that can be spent on other things in addition to broadband.”
As Chuck Sherwood, a former member of the Alliance for Community Media’s Public Policy Working Group adds, “When the word ‘broadband’ is used, you always have to ask: What type of broadband are you talking about? Are you talking about network infrastructure? Are you talking about e-rate subsidies for schools and libraries? Are you talking about grants and loans by, for example, the Department of Agriculture to rural telcos and coops to complete the migration from analog to digital and offer so-called broadband or high-speed Internet access?”
Sascha Meinrath, a Pennsylvania State University professor, notes that “the mechanism that the United States utilizes to engage in digital redlining—discriminatory service practices—are all based upon this seemingly objective matrix: We are going to serve areas with, for example, the highest population density or the largest average return per user.”
The problem, Meinrath says, is that “We’re created these archipelagos of disconnected entities that are extremely expensive to reach. It all boils down to a total lack of a national strategy—and a lack of any universal service method.”
“Broadband Internet is the new electricity,” proclaimed President Joe Biden when he introduced “The American Jobs Plan,” which included broadband upgrades, in March 2021. In November, Biden signed a $1.2 billion infrastructure bill committing $65 billion to improving the nation’s broadband infrastructure.
Mitchell says this money “can be successfully spent and go a long way to improving both Internet access and getting infrastructure to homes that don’t have it.” He says the amount of funding that Congress made available could ensure that every home in the country has access to high-quality Internet service. “But I don’t think it will.”
The reason is that “some states will do a very good job of spending the money effectively and some won’t. The rural broadband challenge will mostly be solved, but the challenge of affordability—which is both a rural and urban issue—remains to be dealt with,” Mitchell adds. “We are making a down-payment on teaching digital skills and getting devices out to people, but I don’t think there is enough money to fully finish that work.”
Meinrath is even more pessimistic, cautioning, “Sadly, the digital divide is quite likely to get substantially worse.” That’s because “as you keep picking the low-hanging fruit and leaving whatever’s left for someone else to pick, serving those last remaining households—the last 10 to 20 percent of the population—will become exponentially more expensive.”
As Meinrath sees it, “those on the wrong side of the digital divide of tomorrow are going to face ever-increasing detrimental impacts on their lives.”