Poor Rural Connectivity Costs Lives

Around the country, there are now elaborate alert systems in areas subject to tornados and other dangerous weather events. These alerts have been shown to save lives since they give folks enough time to seek shelter or get out of the path of a storm. But in a recent case, a family was killed by a storm because they didn’t see the alerts, and other people could not reach them to tell them about the alerts. There are some potential solutions being considered to help solve this problem, but like everything the Federal Communications Commission gets involved in, it’s complicated. The FCC announced a $9 billion 5G fund at the end of 2020 that is aimed at improving rural cellular coverage. The idea of using federal funds to improve rural cellular coverage is further complicated by the huge amounts of federal funding that are aimed at improving rural broadband. It would be extremely wasteful to give the cellular carriers money to extend fiber networks to rural cell sites when other funding should be building the same fiber routes. The big funding for rural broadband seems likely to eliminate the need to fund fiber for most rural cell sites. It still makes great sense to provide subsidies to build towers and open rural cell sites because it’s nearly impossible to make a business case for a rural cell tower that only reaches a small number of households. None of these solutions are going to be fast, so there is no quick fix in the immediate future.