Rural Broadband is Still a Mess

Rural broadband initiatives have a very mixed record of success. Obviously, I agree with the goal of connecting everyone to the internet, but this have historically been a gift to the telco industry, construction firms that lay cable, and so on.

It’s too bad, because there’s a rural broadband model that works: the rural co-op. Power co-ops have been around since rural electrification, beginning in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. But there are also telco co-ops. In my hometown, the co-op provides broadband and telephone over fiber. Their rate is competitive (say $100/mo for phone and internet), but every year they issue a huge dividend to co-op members (it’s like $400-600 for someone paying $100/mo). It’s amazing how good the service is.

Since we don’t want to embrace co-ops and use them to extend rural broadband, we decided on yet another initiative. As part of Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, $42.5 billion was alloted to BEAD, Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. This program was supposed to provide 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up Internet access to rural areas, preferring fiber. These types of programs always move slowly, since each state has to identify areas that need broadband, submit proposals, etc.

By the time the Trump administration took over, only three states had made it to the step of issuing a final proposal for public comment. Of course, right-wing media was shitting on the broadband initiative from the get-go, because they knew that it would be an easy target, since these projects always get mired down, especially because incumbent providers want to get a big piece of the pie. In New York State, for example, an earlier rural broadband initiative was heavily co-opted by cable providers, and it just turned into a way for public money to finance privately owned infrastructure.

The latest from BEAD is that the director is out, and he sent the staff a letter warning them about switching over to Starlink instead of the current plan of mostly fiber.

The FCC had rejected Musk’s Starlink low-earth-orbit satellite internet multiple times for another rural internet access program, apparently due to the FCC’s insistence that Starlink show an ability to deliver over 9 years. There are many good reasons to think that Starlink won’t be able to do that. Their satellites fall to earth and have to be replaced regularly, the service is probably losing money for parent company SpaceX, the latest and best satellite technology requires heavy lift rockets that seem to keep blowing up. In short, there’s a lot of risk inherent in committing to Starlink for rural broadband — they could be out of business in a year, easily.

But, at the moment, Starlink works and fiber is years away. I’ve used Starlink when traveling, and 100 down / 20 up is the low end of the service, as long as you’re not in a congested area. And, generally, rural areas won’t be congested. So, the real issue here is that, instead of being used for the few areas where running fiber is prohibitively expensive considering the number of people who would be served, Musk will want Starlink used for everything.

This isn’t the stupidest use of Starlink that I’ve seen, but as usual, Musk is going to suck up as much of the $42.5 billion as he can, he’ll throw away work that’s already been done, and he’ll claim that he’s saved us all money.

That all said, the fundamental, underlying issue is that the best way to supply broadband to rural areas is to use the same model that we used for rural electrification: the co-op. But we don’t want to do that, because there wouldn’t be enough profit to spread around.