We’re trading centuries of Internet access for one more mile of fiber

Imagine being told that your state government has the funds to give your family an affordable high-speed Internet connection—not just this year, but every year for the next two centuries. Now, imagine that same government decides instead to run a fiber optic cable to a single house at the end of a long rural road. This is not a thought experiment. It’s the real tradeoff now playing out across the country under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. And here’s the kicker: Affordability—not lack of infrastructure—is a much bigger reason people are offline. If we’re serious about closing the digital divide, we have to stop confusing infrastructure with access. The fastest rural fiber network in the world does nothing for a low-income mother in a city apartment if she can’t afford to connect. A pristine fiber line to a country mansion means little to an elderly veteran in the suburbs who doesn’t know how to log on to the network that was already built in his area. BEAD has the potential to close that divide. But if we let ideology and fiber purism guide how we spend these billions, we may end up with miles of fiber and most unconnected people still left offline. 

[Joe Kane is Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s director for broadband and spectrum policy.]