Broadband and Building Community

In a conversation on April 6 at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s 40th anniversary celebration, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) and Glen Echo Group CEO Maura Corbett discussed building community—and the role broadband will play in building and strengthening communities moving forward. Congressman Clyburn founded the Rural Broadband Task Force to help find solutions to the digital divide. Much of the discussion on April 6 focused on bringing broadband to rural areas that, of yet, do not have broadband service. But Corbett asked about urban areas, too. When President Joe Biden met with Congressional leaders to help shape the debate around infrastructure legislation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) deferred to Majority Whip Clyburn to make the case for including broadband under the infrastructure umbrella since, traditionally, infrastructure was thought of as mainly roads, bridges, power systems, and buildings. Congressional leadership agreed that universal broadband is a national challenge. “It is absolutely no different in the inner cities than it is in rural communities,” said Congressman Clyburn. He recognized that deploying broadband networks in rural areas presents its own problems, but “in some urban areas, there's as much disconnect as you'll find in rural communities.”

[Adrianne B Furniss is executive director at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.]