The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) invested $23.6 million in high-speed broadband infrastructure. This investment will build an all-fiber network that will serve more than 3,000 farms, businesses and homes spread over more than 400 square miles in rural Duchesne and Uintah counties. UBTA-UBET Communications Inc., dba STRATA Networks, will use an $11.8 million ReConnect loan and an $11.8 million ReConnect grant to expand high-speed broadband connectivity within the Uintah Basin, including Ute Indian Tribe communities on the Uintah and Ouray reservation. The company, headquartered in Roosevelt, Utah, was founded in 1948 to serve rural residents in the Uintah Basin.

The persistent problem of the digital divide is hardening into a state of “Internet Inequality.” We know that millions of Virginians still lack access to high-quality affordable broadband. But, because of flaws in how the Federal Communications Commission collects its broadband data, we don’t actually know where they all are. That’s a cause for concern, and I am pleased that our friends in Congress sitting here today are also working to require the FCC to secure reliable broadband deployment data. For too long, the FCC has subsidized networks that are obsolete by the time they are built. Less than 10 years ago we subsidized “broadband’ service at download speeds of just 4 Mbps. We all know those speeds won’t cut it today. Universal Service Fund dollars are too scarce and too badly needed to be spent building networks that will be obsolete before we are able to get everyone connected. The FCC should be working to ensure everyone gets access to high-speed networks that will meet Virginians’ needs for years to come.

The California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), a program launched in 2008 to connect all Californians to high-speed Internet, was an early success. It helped build middle mile open access fiber to hard-to-serve communities and delivered high-speed access to areas that never had Internet. It funded fiber-to-the-home to public housing, ensuring low income users had the same high-speed access that wealthy neighborhoods had. And it was rapidly closing the digital divide that low income urban and rural Californians faced, due to years of neglect from incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs). But CASF’s success inevitably led to its undoing—by drawing attention from lobbyists for AT&T, Frontier, and Comcast, who pushed through laws that effectively shut the program down. 

Fearing competition and substitution, these ISPs have regularly gone to Sacramento to pass laws under the false promise that less government involvement will help expand broadband access. Yet the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the Sacramento ISP lobby has actually done nothing more than ensure most Californians have only one choice of provider, and ensured that the state has no broadband plan while our international competitors march aggressively towards a gigabit fiber future. But there have been recent victories to reverse this trend, including: restoring the California Public Utilities Commission’s regulatory authority over broadband companies, the state’s passage of the strongest net neutrality law in the land (that is still facing litigation from the ISPs), and Gov Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) Call for a Broadband For All Plan. 

North Dakota has fostered a tech sector thanks in part to being one of the most connected states in the country — a giant feat considering it’s also one of the most rural. “We realized that for us to be competitive, we had to have that connectivity,” says Doug Burgum, who was president of Great Plains Software when it was bought by Microsoft and is now governor of the state. 

A 2018 report on broadband connectivity ranked ND as the 18th most connected state in the country, just behind much more urbanized Illinois. Montana is North Dakota’s neighbor and came in dead last — 50th — in the report. 69% of Montanans have broadband access while 92% of North Dakotans can access high speed internet. The story of ND’s internet success is both a lesson of how decisions can pay off decades later but also the deep-set challenges that many rural states face as they try to catch up, and then keep up, with the speed of technology.

Mike Saperstein, VP of Strategic Initiatives & Partnerships at USTelecom, notes that the greater concentration of fiber in places like ND is thanks to “historical differences about how these rural areas, and the carriers that serve them, are supported by government.” These differences in support allowed local companies “to invest more heavily in fiber to the home solutions.” Gov Burgum (R-ND), who likes to mention his small government bona-fides, also supports a greater role for Washington using the model of rural electrification and telephones from decades ago. “In the same way we needed to bring electricity and telephone connection to rural areas,” he says, “we've got to do that with broadband.”

In the race to dominate 5G, the Pentagon is the force causing the most concern. The most coveted piece of spectrum is the “mid-band,” a set of frequencies that can carry far more data than current cellphone signals. Since the 1960s, rights over much of the mid-band have been claimed by government agencies, most notably the Department of Defense, which says it needs to use mid-band waves for research and military communications. Critics say the military is barely using those airwaves, and by squatting on the rights it is blocking American firms from developing better 5G networks. Now, as 5G moves quickly from a sales pitch to a business reality, a significant battle is erupting between wireless carriers, which want the government to free up the Pentagon’s share of the mid-band airwaves for commercial use, and Pentagon generals, who warn of national-security risks if they lose control.