The Daily Yonder posts an article from Broadband Breakfast’s Drew Clark about broadband in rural areas. It starts with a look at the impact of the Farm Bill on Reconnect funding…
The current fight [related to the Farm Bill] between the House and Senate over SNAP funding levels has been the loudest obstacle to passage, and proved to be the case on Thursday. But tucked inside the Farm Bill’s rural development title is a provision that governs the future of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect broadband program.
eConnect has provided more than $4.4 billion in loans and grants for rural broadband deployment since 2018, reaching some of America’s most remote and expensive-to-serve communities. The House Farm Bill, passed in April by a narrow 224-200 margin, would make ReConnect permanent.
But the House version sets minimum project speeds at just 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 25 Mbps for uploads. And it restricts eligibility to areas lacking 25 Mbps for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads for service. Critics say that – as with previous broadband programs such as the Connect America Fund deploying broadband at 10 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads, such low thresholds would doom Rural America to a lower tier of service.
The proposed Senate version takes a more ambitious approach. In addition to making ReConnect permanent, it would use higher required speeds and broader eligibility. At a previous hearing on the topic before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Jesse Shekleton, director of Broadband Operations at Jo-Carroll Energy pushed for the higher speed standard. “Demands for bandwidth on farms will continue to grow,” he said
The Farm Bill also matters for broadband beyond ReConnect. Both the House and Senate versions would codify technical assistance for rural broadband planning and include provisions preventing ReConnect from overlapping with the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant program of the U.S. Commerce Department.
Looks at economic impact…
Broadband and rural economic development was the subject of Wednesday’s Broadband Breakfast Live Online discussion. In it, panelists said that broadband has become the price of admission for a rural community rather than a growth strategy on its own.
Well-connected rural counties post 18% higher per capita income and roughly 210% higher business growth than underserved peers, according to a Center for Rural Innovation study cited by Bartlett Cleland, executive director of the Innovation Economy Alliance.
And there’s a look at BEAD in Minnesota…
But being approved [for BEAD] is not the same as being built. Minnesota’s projects will reach 74,739 locations with $378.9 million in federal money and nearly $190 million in matching funds. The state must place its remaining initial projects under contract by Oct. 8. Getting the first one signed took more than 18 rounds of revisions with federal reviewers.
And often, the fights are over poles. Electric cooperatives, which own much of the existing pole infrastructure in rural America and are well-positioned to build broadband alongside it, are finding BEAD’s pole attachment rules onerous. Two co-ops said they turned down tentative BEAD awards entirely because compliance costs made the projects unworkable.
NTIA, however, has defended this pole-attachment policy as necessary for deployment.
