Obama Can Revolutionize Rural America with Broadband, FDR-style

Obama Can Revolutionize Rural America with Broadband, FDR-style

by David Woolner | Post a Comment

In a speech delivered last week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, President Obama unveiled his plan to bring high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of America. Such an initiative, he said, would spark “new innovation, new investment and new jobs,” and, if successful, would connect “every corner of America to the digital age.”

Investing federal dollars in bringing the benefits of high-speed wireless to rural America is not unlike the efforts Franklin Roosevelt launched more than 75 years ago to bring electricity to America’s family farms. In Roosevelt’s day, it is estimated that roughly nine out of ten farms in America lacked electricity. As such, most farm families still lived a life that was more reminiscent of the 19th century. With no electricity, there was no running water, and hence no indoor plumbing or bathrooms. Water had to be brought into the house from wells or a nearby stream and heat was provided by indoor stoves. No electricity also meant that most farms lacked the convenience of modern appliances and had no way to obtain entertainment or information over the radio.

Prior to FDR’s administration, advocates of rural power had found private companies disinterested due to the high costs of extending lines into the countryside, so they turned to the federal government. But even though many of the ideas being floated at the time involved the development of rural access to electricity through public-private cooperation, such plans fell on deaf ears.

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President Obama’s National Wireless Initiative is not unlike rural electrification. Properly administered and executed, it too can improve rural America’s quality of life and has the potential, as the President observed, to “accelerate breakthroughs in health, education, and transportation.” It also provides us with another example of how the federal government, in the tradition of the New Deal, can and must take the lead in improving the economic infrastructure of the country — even in a digital age.

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Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America

By KIM SEVERSON

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In rural America, only 60 percent of households use broadband Internet service, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Commerce. That is 10 percent less than urban households. Over all, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all.

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Pushing America’s digital expansion is a point of emphasis for President Obama, who on Thursday night held a private meeting with Silicon Valley’s elite, including Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and Carol Bartz, president and chief executive of Yahoo. His administration has given $7.2 billion in stimulus money toward the effort, including the map, which took five years and $200 million to develop and shows a number of discrepancies in the quality and availability of broadband access between rural and urban communities.

“This is like electricity was,” said Brian Depew, an assistant director of the Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit research group in Lyons, Neb. “This is a critical utility.”

“You often hear people talk about broadband from a business development perspective, but it’s much more significant than that,” Mr. Depew added. “This is about whether rural communities are going to participate in our democratic society. If you don’t have effective broadband, you are cut out of things that are really core to who we are as a country.”

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