Chairman Pai Remarks to Kansas Broadband Conference

There’s no question that high-speed Internet is a game-changer for rural Americans. It’s improving standards of living more than any new technology since the rural electrification effort in the early 20th century. That is—so long as you have access. And that’s the big challenge.

Rural Americans too often find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. In rural America, 28% of households lack access to high-speed, fixed service. In urban areas, only 2% go without. Rural Americans are missing out on opportunities for jobs, health care, education, and more, and there’s a significant cost to those lost opportunities. But I worry that we’re losing something even greater if rural communities remain stuck in the analog age. That’s the slow fade of rural communities themselves. To be clear, I’m not saying that the digital divide is the reason why rural communities are shrinking. This trend started before the commercial Internet even existed. What I am saying is that how we deal with the digital divide will affect the destiny of towns like Parsons and Ulysses and Beloit and Hiawatha. It’ll help determine if this population loss gets faster, slows down, or is potentially reversed. Broadband-enabled opportunities for jobs, education, health care, and agriculture can be a great equalizer for rural America. But so long as some rural communities don’t have broadband, they’ll fall further and further behind.

To spur network deployment in sparsely populated areas where the economic incentives for private investment don’t exist, the FCC is providing direct funding that leverages—not displaces—private capital expenditures. But we also want to modernize our regulations to give companies a stronger business case to build and expand high-speed networks. The plain truth is that bureaucratic red tape at all levels of government can slow the pace and increase the cost of network deployment.