EP 47: Leaping the Digital Divide
The people say it's time to close the broadband gap, and really find a way to make internet speeds adequate for the modern age, for everyone, from areas in cities where the service isn't enough, to rural areas that lack access altogether. A new report shows us how to get there. On this episode, we hear from the report's authors along with state- and local-level leaders who endorse the plan as essential to connect residents with the gigabit pace of the world. Full report this episode was based on: https://www.nclm.org/broadband
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation.
Broadband is critical twenty first century infrastructure. It is not a luxury anymore.
We have students in our local high school that have to choose between going to lunch or going to the library or the computer center to complete their homework because they have no access at the house.
Without access to adequate broadband networks,
communities are denied the ability to grow, prosper, and succeed. Frankly, this challenge is just too big. It won't be met solely by the public sector nor will it be met solely by the private sector. It's unfair of us to expect that. Instead, we expect that we can take the strengths of all of our sectors. The people say it's time to close the broadband gap and really find a way to make internet speeds adequate for the modern age for everyone. From areas and cities where the service isn't enough to rural areas that lack access altogether.
A new report shows us a way to get there. My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns in the face of change. From the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Episode 47.
Marshall McLuhan said that one day we would all live in a global village, an electronic community interconnected by communications networks that would shrink the earth. Well, the global village has arrived, and its main street is called the Internet, where people from around the world do meet electronically to exchange ideas. Today, we'll surf the net. We'll explore the Internet. Broadband is critical twenty first century
infrastructure. It is not a luxury anymore. It's no more of a luxury than access to roads, water, sewer, or electricity. Without access to adequate broadband networks, individuals are denied educational opportunities and modern delivery of health care. Businesses are denied access to customers, markets, products, and data. Communities are denied the ability to grow, prosper, and succeed.
Okay. Between those two clips, we just skipped some decades. That last voice you heard was Michael Lazarra, the mayor pro tem of Jacksonville, North Carolina, and the current president of the league. In 2009, Congress told the Federal Communications Commission to write a national broadband plan, and the ensuing dialogue really got at a big piece of this. Some argue this is something solely for the private sector, that that's not government's business. This has evolved and should evolve based on private market forces. Blair Levin from the Brookings Institution says that's a flawed thought in terms of history. He points out that the development of all communications networks came with a substantial government role. Examples like monopoly franchises, spectrum allocations, poll access, intellectual property rights, and so on. Levin says it's also flawed to say it should only be a private interest going forward. For one, if you look at all the intense debates over things like net neutrality, small cell deployment, five gs, it's fairly obvious, Levin says, that the public has both an interest and an economic stake in the development of our communications networks. And for anyone thinking, I don't know anybody who doesn't have Internet. Well, think about this. When we say things like, we need broadband because people need access to the world, we're not just talking about Internet access. You can access the web with a dial up connection.
Two ways. You need to go ahead. You need a computer and a phone, and suddenly you're part of a new mesh of people, programs, archives, ideas.
But that's not the pace of the world today. That's not the accommodation for today's data. And by highlighting dial up, I'm obviously exaggerating low to make a point, but let's scale it up. You may have what's advertised as quote unquote fast Internet service. It might be alright for casual everyday web surfing and email and so on. But what about for businesses that conduct a lot of their work online or have to upload large files to the cloud or share big reams of information? That's just a normal thing that businesses are doing. It's the world now. We're at fiber speed and not just for big industry. It's all kinds, and Internet service needs to keep up.
Demand at the level of public interest. I began my comments speaking of broadband being critical infrastructure, comparing it to roads, electricity, water, and sewer. Mayor Pro Tem Lazaro again at a press conference in Raleigh, North Carolina last month. It is important to note that all levels of government played and continue to play roles in the development and the delivery of these other types of infrastructure. Why is that? At the local level is because municipal governments are uniquely positioned to understand local needs and facilitate local solutions. We know and understand infrastructure investment. Many municipal governments have the financial wherewithal and the financial structures and community vision to make long term investments for long term needs. But we need partners, public and private.
Yeah. The funding of broadband to date has been mostly from the private sector, But keep looking at that public stake, Levin writes in a new report that we just put out at the League of Municipalities. It's called Leaping the Digital Divide, Encouraging Policies and Partnerships to Improve Broadband Access across North Carolina. While While this report is focused on North Carolina, there may be applications for it all over the country. So Levin from the Brookings Institution, he writes the intro. Indeed, he says, the public benefits are so substantial that communities who lack good broadband will soon find themselves without the stable resources to thrive in this century. The words of Blair Levin from the Brookings Institution. And if you wanna hear it straight from the public, 90% of respondents in a recent study about choosing where to live identified quality broadband as second only to safe streets. And this is a widespread issue. Speaking for North Carolina, there's a lot of rural. Some big cities like, you know, Raleigh, Charlotte, Winston Salem, Greensboro, Wilmington, and so on, but a lot of rural area. More than 600,000 rural residents don't have any option for high speed Internet in this state, which you might guess is a numbers game. The number of potential customers to incentivize the private offering of a service, even though the demand is practical. And as technology evolves, the demand will continue to grow whether the Internet service providers offer service in those areas or not.
But it's not just rural. When an architect in a city of 50,000 people talks about potentially moving his business because he cannot access the kind of Internet speeds needed to upload files, then this is not a problem that's just confined to rural North Carolina.
If you wanna research this independently, you know, look up FCC data on how much of the country is served with broadband speeds. Keep this in mind. The FCC data is inaccurate. The FCC requires Internet Service Providers to report twice a year on where they offer Internet Access service, and at what speeds that service allows. Because the data are reported at the Census block level, and because the FCC allows a provider to count all tracts in that census block as served, even if only one tract actually receives that service, then the reported service levels often appear inflated compared with actual service offered on the ground. There's more. Many Internet service providers still report their advertised speeds rather than the actual speeds that customers experience. And the reported speeds do not account for slowdowns that happen during rush hour, when numerous customers simultaneously use a network. This network congestion occurs with most non fiber broadband technologies.
It's not just rural areas. It's municipalities that a lot of these folks here represent that are in these rural areas that just are not connected
to the digital infrastructure to get ahead in this world. This is North Carolina state representative John Zocca. He's from Fayetteville, North Carolina, a big military town, Fort Bragg. He's been pushing legislation to help close the digital divide, an effort that would help to close another kind of divide that gets a lot of play. We continue to talk about the urban rural divide, and we think that we can solve it with money or
luring companies to rural areas. That isn't really the answer. The answer in today's day and age is to get the whole state connected to high speed broadband. Without that, we lose a really valuable tool in drawing companies to rural areas. Children are growing up in rural areas, what's the attraction for them to stay there? Can they start a business? No, because they can't connect to the Internet, they can't connect to customers. So there are rural areas, we're losing population, which impacts on counties, cost structure in terms of building new schools, paying for teachers, things like that. It's not only needed, it's absolutely necessary that we have to take the actions required to connect to every last house on the last dirt road, from the mountains to the sea in this state to afford our citizens the opportunity to fully participate in a global economy. Without that, we're not fulfilling our obligations as elected servants, and without that, our children are just gonna fall further and further behind.
We have vacant buildings that people call and they ask, okay, what do you offer? Do you have water? Check. You have sewer? Check. Broadband?
No check. This is Jackie Hampton. She's the town clerk for the small town of Bolton, North Carolina, less than 700 residents. It's only about a half hour west of the more dense and economically thriving city of Wilmington. We have students in our local high school that have to choose between going to lunch
or going to the library or the computer center to complete their homework because they have no access at the house. We have students and senior citizens that park daily in front of our senior center building. We thought something was going on. But, no, they're sitting in their vehicles, and they're accessing our Internet because they can't do it at home. For towns such as Bolton to to have a bright future, we need Internet access. We need broadband. We need help.
Stories like that all over the place. The stakes are high, affecting business owners, health care providers, and their patients, and, like Hampton said, school students. You heard Mayor Pro Tem Lazaro talk about an architect earlier. He was talking about an architect in downtown Burlington, North Carolina. This architect, he pointed out that it can take six minutes to upload a typical client file, quote, when it really should take about a second, end quote. He said there's a certain point where it's just not financially feasible to stay in that area because he can't grow. Lazarra had a similar story.
I am an owner of a a graphics and sign manufacturing company in Jacksonville, North Carolina. I've been in business over seventeen years. And as our business continued to grow, our needs continued to grow with that in order to exchange large formatted files, CAD files, that are required to send back back and forth with, potential consumers. It took us a year and a half to get fiber to our building. I was on the verge of moving our company, which is in excess of a million dollars, worth of sales because I simply was stagnated by the broadband width that we had in our company as we continue. It kinda stifled us. But luckily, we were and and this is just bringing it across the street, literally across the street, and we're a hometown of of 50,000 plus.
Health care providers in rural towns face their own unique access challenges. Kim Schwartz is the CEO at Roanoke Chawan Community Health Center, which as a federally qualified community health center, operates facilities in a number of different locations around the state. The centers themselves are served by CenturyLink. That's an Internet service provider. And though internet service can be slow at times, Schwartz says the bigger issue is the lack of quality residential connections and in some cases, service at all for patients and the healthcare providers who work there. Patients who have chronic congestive heart failure and diabetes are a couple examples. They're most at risk, typically having readings of their blood pressure and other health indicators monitored remotely and automatically from their homes. The monitors are connected via Bluetooth and the readings fed to an Internet module in their home. So back at the healthcare clinics, workers watch an Internet connected dashboard to track each patient. Of course, if those patients don't have an Internet or wireless connection, none of that monitoring is possible. And Schwartz, the CEO, said about ten percent of patients fall into that category. Gotta point out that different communities have different economic bases, and broadband access plays into pretty much all of them. While the tech sector may be the dominant presence in one city, in a university in another, or health care and so on, tourism might be the big figure in many towns. Checking out the coastal town of Washington, North Carolina, council member William Pitt, who's the vice president of the league, said before they had broadband access there, there was actually a boating focused publication telling people that because Washington doesn't have broadband, didn't at the time anyway, to maybe avoid that area when it comes to communications.
We were listed on active catchment as a place to maybe avoid because we did not have broadband access. But now that we have it, we're seeing more and more traffic on our waterfront. It's allowing our citizens and our visitors to use social media to say, hey. This is what's going on in Washington. Why don't you come on down here? This is a picture I just tweeted out or I just did an Instagram post. This is an active There's an x over Washington saying There was x as far as active captain, which is a boating website. Yeah. It was not a place to come because you could not download your navigational chart. So that in itself proves that this does work, and it proves also that the the the the digital divide, which very few people talk about, they don't know what it is. It is a division. It is a way that that keeps things away from people. It keeps people from visiting your city. It keeps your town from growing. It keeps you from telling your story. And when you have a a place on the water such as Washington, it needs to be promoted. It needs to be promoted for responsible growth and it also needs very importantly to realize that every citizen should have access to broadband just as they have access to electricity. It is, as I've stated numerous times, it is the new electricity.
It's the public interest is that is that big. It it is that big and it's that important.
And when we talk about kids with textbooks in schools as so my my colleagues have talked about, it doesn't look good to see people at McDonald's with their tablets spread out or with their notebooks spread out trying to do homework at McDonald's. And after how many cups of coffee? How many sodas can you drink between your homework? So it's important that we not only that we did it, it's important we continue to do it, and it's important that we reach out to our communities who don't have it and say, hey. This is how I did it. This is how you can do it. We know that broadband is the infrastructure challenge of our time, but we also know that communities that have it can and will thrive. This is Erin Winya, legislative counsel at the League of Municipalities. She was a co author of the report, which doesn't just identify a problem and then call on somebody else to do something about it. She gives actual policy solutions that bring different groups together.
And we're not just talking about the minimum speed of broadband, which the FCC defines as 25 megabit per second downloads and three megabit per second uploads. We're talking about fiber. With fiber technology, download and upload speeds are the same as one another. And that's at gigabit speed or a minimum 1,000 megabits per second.
So as we've talked about already today, we know that this situation has played out before in our state. Over a hundred years ago, when we faced similar infrastructure challenges related to our road and transportation networks, our water and transportation networks, our water and sewer, electric and natural gas, all of that, brought prosperity once those services were provided in those communities. And likewise, broadband, access can do the same. So fortunately, local government officials have been in the infrastructure business throughout this whole time, for well over a century. And that's what this report would like to see continued. The twist that we offer, in this suggestion, of course, is a modern innovation and that's the public private partnership. Allowing public private partnerships to serve as the structure in which broadband service is delivered is likely the best way to extend it to the hard to reach places in our state. So what are we talking about exactly when we talk about these partnerships? Really, they are arrangements that serve to allocate risk or minimize risk and control over how broadband, service is provided in these communities. And they also are designed to leverage the strengths of each partner. So what's the strength of the public partner? And we're and when I say public, we're talking about municipalities for sure, but also counties, electric co ops, and others. Public partners are very adept at building infrastructure. That's what they bring to the table in these partnerships. So that infrastructure can include the following. It can include the fiber strands, the poles that the strands run between, or the conduit in the ground, the the plastic pipes if we're burying, the cables underground. It can also include antennas and the electronics that literally light up the fiber, so it's lit. Light pulses are being sent through the fiber that carry the data and Internet traffic, from one point to another. All of that is the infrastructure that we're talking about. The local partner, the public partner focuses on that strength, and then the private partner comes in to actually operate and provide the service. I wanna be really clear about that. Under these partnership models that we see across the country, that's how it works. The private sector is the one providing the service. So what they do is keep each sector doing what they do best, and we believe that this type of arrangement makes good sense because, frankly, this challenge is just too big. It won't be met solely by the public sector nor will it be met solely by the private sector. It's unfair of us to expect that. Instead, we expect that we can take the strengths of all of our sectors, to reach the 640,000 North Carolinians who lack broadband service now. That's the figure that our state broadband office has put out based on FCC data. So that federal data, as we've alluded to earlier, is probably under reporting the scope of of the lack of service. So we're concerned about those 640,000 North Carolinians that we think lack service. We're also concerned about the many residents and business owners that, those who came before me talked about where they may have some level of service now, but it's simply inadequate for their needs. It's not fast enough. All of that can be addressed, we think, if public private partnerships are allowed across the state. In addition to those partnerships, though, our report does suggest many other ways that state and local officials can incentivize construction of broadband infrastructure across the state. So, we encourage our state leaders to look at those, but most importantly, to take a really hard look at the public private partnership model as they are thinking about how to meet this challenge.
High speed broadband is now fundamental to commerce, education, and health care. It's essential twenty first century infrastructure. And as with roads and bridges, communities that are not adequately connected to the larger network cannot and will not succeed economically. Although gaps in access to minimal Internet connections may be closing in rural communities, those connections are nearly obsolete for many uses as soon as established. Meanwhile, the types of high upload speeds required of digitally intensive businesses, whether home based entrepreneurs or high-tech firms connecting to similar businesses around the world, remain lacking in a wide swath of the state, as well as in many parts of the country. Two decades into the digital revolution, it's become clear that private sector solutions alone are not going to close this gap, and that large private sector providers and their investments will continue to primarily focus on densely populated areas. At the same time, local governments, as experienced providers and builders of infrastructure, are uniquely positioned to help close the digital divide. They can accomplish the task, at least not in North Carolina, without help at the state policy level. State policies that encourage and provide more explicit authority for local governments and others to enter into broadband related public private partnerships are required if North Carolina is to meet the digital needs of all of its citizens. Incentives for private providers, dedicated investment by all levels of government, and policies that streamline permitting and construction of broadband delivery systems also need to be part of that solution. The demand for better and faster Internet is not going to slow. Not in North Carolina, not anywhere around the globe. As that demand increases, the technology and investment needed to meet it will only grow as well. So encouraging a blend of public and private investment is required if that demand is to be met. And meeting that demand is fundamental to ensuring that our communities survive and thrive into the twenty first century. So I'll leave you with one last thought. Just something for you to talk about as I lose my voice to a cold. In a lot of towns, there might be Internet service speeds that are close to meeting the minimum of broadband or maybe even at that minimum, Internet service that comes from private providers. Those areas are still gonna have a hard time attracting businesses that need the kinds of speeds that fiber can provide. If small outlying towns had access to fiber speed broadband, think of the potential for, say, work from home positions or home based entrepreneurship blasted into worldwide connections. Just a thought. Thanks for listening and bearing with my declining voice as my quest continues to beat this cold that I've picked up. Living in North Carolina, the weather has been a ping pong match, and it's totally slaying me. Can't wait for consistent springtime weather. Anyway, the report, n clm.org/broadband. Again, the title is Leaping the Digital Divide. The PDF is 70 pages, but it's an easy read. Lots of graphics and pullouts and so on. And it's not clogged with industry jargon. Anybody can read it. Of course, a substantial amount of this episode was pulled directly from that report. In addition to Erin Winiya, the report was authored by Joanne Hovis of CTC Technology and Energy. Nclm.org/broadband. You can find past episodes of Municipal Equation at nclm.org/municipalequation if you're not already subscribed on iTunes or Google Play or some other podcast app. NCLM, to remind you, stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities, which makes this podcast possible. Send me your feedback. I know you've got some. Bbrownnclm dot org or on Twitter. The handle is muniequation, muniequation. And we'll see you next time. This has Ben Brown.
