In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, access to reliable, affordable broadband has evolved from a mere luxury to a critical lifeline for rural communities. It serves as the gateway to essential resources like online education and telehealth, but many remote areas continue to grapple with substantial challenges to unlocking these opportunities.
To confront these challenges head-on, it’s crucial for rural Americans to actively engage local leaders and state broadband offices to share the unique obstacles they face. When reflecting on these obstacles, communities should consider how barriers to connectivity impact their daily lives – whether it’s an absence of broadband infrastructure impeding internet access, high price tags resulting in affordability concerns, or a lack of digital skills or devices.
Especially with Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program money on deck, time is of the essence for sharing our communities’ concerns. We can’t expect to have our needs met without first putting them out there.
Therefore, we should engage within our communities, including with other members and local leadership. Only by sharing our unique perspectives can you help shape broadband policy that makes sense for our diverse communities. This collaboration will also help craft reasonable policy that stretches federal broadband dollars—including from the BEAD Program—as far as we can to truly bring more people online.
By opening this dialogue between neighbors, we can understand who has internet access in their homes but not in their barns or a field at the edge of their property. By sharing our concerns, we can also help share solutions, like how to use high-speed connectivity for remote crop monitoring, resulting in higher yields and time saved. Or how advanced connectivity has opened the door to new supplier relationships and easier coordination of deliveries.
In addition to community engagement, it’s essential to establish an open dialogue with the state broadband office to share these unique needs and streamline communication. Creating state broadband offices as the one-stop shop for broadband information gives communities a clear source to direct questions and receive information about broadband-related activities, including project updates and funding opportunities. By centralizing this information in one office, the state can improve the efficiency of its own operations, allowing more broadband money to focus on connecting people rather than on administrative business. Also, this centralization can help reduce the burden on rural communities, which may require additional capacity for extensive research.
Again, this dialogue can lead to effective solutions only if communities take a hard look at the barriers they face and are willing to speak up about potential solutions to overcome them. With the remote areas that make up our communities, we know that some don’t have internet access – meaning the technology has not yet been built to their homes. To help overcome this barrier, we can utilize federal BEAD funding and work with internet providers to build high-speed connectivity to those locations. For those struggling to make ends meet, we should look at what affordable solutions are available, including low-cost plans and federal relief. We can consider digital literacy training and workshops at area libraries to close the skills gap needed to navigate the online world.
Many solutions to these barriers involve leveraging private sector resources. Therefore, in considering effective solutions, rural communities should look to public-private partnerships. Especially for the access barrier, these partnerships can be essential to building internet infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively – as communities can rely on provider’s experience and capital to bolster federal dollars. Many states worry their BEAD funds won’t be enough to connect all their residents as building infrastructure in remote areas is expensive. Sometimes, to make the most of each federal dollar, State Broadband Offices may seek partnerships with providers that will contribute some of their own funds and expertise to the project.
Such partnerships leverage the combined strengths to expand internet access – just as collaboration between community members, local officials, and state broadband offices will help rural communities overcome connectivity barriers.
Universal internet access is too big of a project for any one entity alone. It will take all of us to truly close the digital divide.
