Telecompetitor recently ran an interesting article that started talking about the Universal Service Fund and ended by describing a rural-rural digital divide…
Within the context of broadband, there are two rural Americas. Generally speaking, rural Americans served by small rural local telephone companies and/or co-ops tend to have very good access to broadband services (whether they actually subscribe to it is a different story). Rural Americans served by large tier one and tier two carriers like Qwest and Verizon may not be so lucky. As Gardner points out, “About two thirds of all housing units without broadband are located in the service territory of larger [companies like] Windstream, Frontier, CenturyLink, Qwest, and AT&T.”
(The comments to the article are particularly interesting to read.)
I’m tempted to just leave my post here because there are so many sides to the story but, if you had asked me about a rural-rural divide before I read the article, I would have thought about the folks who live in a town and the folks who live in the outskirts – beyond the reach of most providers.
What I don’t know is whether local service providers reach those folks better than bigger guys or are those folks in the outskirts are not counted in the local provider’s service area – where as the bigger providers may be painting their coverage areas with a wider paint brush. Also I feel like it’s dangerous to talk about “most local providers” because each provider is different, each town is different, each market is different.
This article accurately outlines the situation in Minnesota. It is uncertain what the changes in the independent telephone business will do to MN. We have CenturyLink purchasing Qwest. Iowa Telecom purchased a bunch of MN exchanges. Other independents seem to be positioning themselves to be sold. The only stability seems to be with the cooperatives as they continue to incrementally grow their service areas and build out FTTH.
I wanted to post a comment I got from David Russell at Calix (with his permission)…
Saw your note this morning on rural rural divide. The tier 3 rural coops have a policy that they will serve all their customers over time, irrespective of location. Among the tier 3 private firms, there is not a town vs rural divide in
most cases. In fact, many have left the tonws to be served by copper because of the short loop lengths (which allow for higher speeds) and have used fiber for outside the towns.