[RTC List] Rural America not ready for broadband?

[Bob Morse]

Hogwash say ISPs

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/rural-america-not-ready-for-broadband-hogwash.ars

Rural fiber developers are fed up with the line that folks in the 
heartland aren't ready for broadband. They gave Ars an earful at a 
conference in Washington, D.C.
By Matthew Lasar | Last updated May 10, 2009 6:32 PM CT

Rural America not ready for broadband? Hogwash, say ISPs

They came from across the country, invited by the Benton Foundation to 
extol the virtues of independent broadband at the National Press Club HQ 
in Washington, D.C. And a collegial bunch they were: crack developers 
from ISPs in Oregon, Vermont, and Minnesota, happy to talk up their 
achievements in building fiber and DSL networks for rural areas and 
small towns.

They all knew each other and seemed to be old pals, so Ars settled in 
for a pleasant afternoon of mutual self-congratulation. Then somebody 
from the audience spoke up.

"This is a question for the rural end of the table," he asked. "One of 
the studies that we see most frequently is one from Pew which contends 
that there isn't very much demand [for broadband] in rural areas, 
[which] is why it hasn't been built out." What did the panelists think 
of that?

A sore point had been raised, and suddenly the collegial smiles were gone.

"It clearly is a myth," declared Gary Evans of Hiawatha Broadband 
Communications, a rural ISP based in Minnesota. "We are not a low priced 
provider in any community that we serve, but we are a broadband 
provider." In one rural region, Evans noted, 60 percent of the 
population signed up with the company "before we put a shovel in the 
ground."

"Now, I would suggest to you that if there's no demand out there, that 
simply would not be the case," he insisted.

"Where do these Pew guys get their money?" grumbled another panelist.
Not interested?

It's unclear which Pew Internet and American Life study everybody was 
talking about. One of the most frequently mentioned says that about two 
thirds of folks who don't have broadband don't want it. They're "not 
interested," they told Pew, or they can't get access, or it's 
"difficult," or they feel that they're "too old to learn."

Another survey reported that, at the end of 2005, broadband penetration 
in rural America lagged behind the rest of the country by about 15 
percent. A lack of access explains this phenomenon, Pew explained, 
noting that rural residents with high speed Internet tend to use it as 
much as city dwellers. But, reading the document, one could also surmise 
that a demand issue is also at play.

"Rural Americans are, on average, older, less educated, and with lower 
incomes than people living in other parts of the United States," the Pew 
survey observed, "all factors associated with lower levels of online use."

A recent comment sent to the Federal Communications Commission by the 
broadband mapping outfit Connected Nation very explicitly makes this 
point. "Stated simply, the business case for broadband deployment is 
difficult in many rural areas where computer ownership and computer use 
skills are low," the group's filing said.

There's no offense intended by any of these observations. But lots of 
rural ISP boosters are getting pretty touchy about the "broadband to 
nowhere" line—that people in the countryside are too spread out, 
illiterate, old, or just too plain out of it to demand high-speed access.

Baloney, these panelists declared. "Rural America is both hungry for 
broadband and anxious to use it," Evans insisted. "It's nonsense," added 
Tim Nulty of ECFiber, a Vermont ISP. "I don't know where they get it."

"When we started our project," Nulty continued, "the towns in question 
each had to have a referendum to join the project. Twenty-two towns [in 
total]. The worst vote we got was 78% percent in favor. Eight towns were 
unanimous."

Nulty is a fiber-to-the-home developer who hopes to have his network of 
rural subscribers completely fibered up by 2010, and will offer speeds 
of up to 100 Mbps. We're talking access to 900 square miles with about 
55,000 people here.

"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."

It was definitely bragging time at the event. Hiawatha's Evans came with 
stats about what his Winona, Minnesota based fiber-to-the-home ISP has 
accomplished: 35 percent penetration by the end of its first year 
(1999), a host of other small towns following suit, new businesses, 
wired hospitals, and dramatic residential growth, "in some instances, 
reversing six decades of population decline." HBC hopes to tap into that 
7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money to extend its reach another 900 
miles, Evans says.

Neighboring Jaguar Communications brought high speeds out to a south 
Minnesota area of about 12,000 square rural miles, and has 10,000 
customers who live in Blooming Prairie, Owatonna, Waseca, and six more 
townships with similar names. Its board chair, Donny Smith, described 
the ISP as "a group of local people who decided to do it. Nobody else 
would do it, so we decided to do it ourselves."
You can't download anything

These guys think that rural America's broadband penetration lag needs a 
lot less explaining and a lot more fixing. Rural areas may have some 
non-adopters, but they've also got plenty of people who want to get on 
the high-speed boat ASAP.

Nulty told the story of a rural Vermont repairman whose garage was 
packed with chainsaws, snowmobiles, and other motorized equipment. "I 
can't fix any of them if I can't get an exploded diagram, a shop manual, 
a parts list, and order parts."

"Right now I've got 14k on my dialup, when it works!" the machinist 
lamented. "You can't download anything at 14k. It runs for two hours and 
gets halfway through one page and stops!"

A half hour later, the discussion was still on a roll, with stories 
about rural diabetics being treated from home via video conferencing, 
and shots being lobbed at a Microsoft FCC filing that suggested that the 
government should prioritize its broadband stimulus money for wiring 
schools, libraries, and hospitals.

Sure, those institutions are important, Donny Smith agreed, "but the 
problem with focusing on just those is that they become single-purpose 
networks that do not serve the whole area. If [broadband] is owned by 
the municipal library, it's not going to have services going out to Joe 
Johnson's house down the street."

It's hard to argue with studies suggesting that a variety of factors are 
holding rural broadband back: lack of service, education, skills, and 
even awareness of the possibilities. But these entrepreneurs call them 
overblown. Their neighbors know what will happen, they say, if high 
speed Internet doesn't come to their neck of the woods, and soon.

Without broadband, Nulty warned, "People move out. You can't sell 
houses. People won't come. Kids can't do homework. This isn't about 
games or seeing HBO. This is about community survival."