We Keep Waiting for the Signal

By ART CULLEN

Wouldn’t you know I’m talking to the man with the answers on rural broadband and his voice starts to cut out on the cellphone.

He’s in a suburb of Des Moines. When you are talking about rural broadband, you meet in a metro area loaded with fiber-optics and cell towers so you are certain to be heard. And, you meet with the same people who have been talking about rural broadband forever: the corn growers, the cattlemen, the power cooperatives and phone carriers.

This time is different, says the voice crackling on the other end belonging to Andrew Berke, special representative for broadband at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration within the Commerce Department.

For starters, Congress appropriated $65 billion in its infrastructure bill. Second, it mandates that high-speed Internet access is delivered to every household. Build out the fiber, Berke suggests, and the cell phone signal should improve.

There’s $100 million for each state, at least. There are $30 per-month subsidies for people living under 200% of the poverty line. Phone companies will apply to states that sign on to the initiative to build out those final miles in the knottiest vales with so few people — the hills around Dubuque on the Mississippi River in northeast Iowa or Council Bluffs on the Big Muddy in the southwest quadrant, the two regions where connectivity is poorest in Iowa.

You would think one of those two places might be able to muster lunch for the Commerce Department’s roundtable of interest groups eager to get a chunk of that $100 million. Or Storm Lake, but here you have to drive an hour to catch a bus — much less a plane or train. If everyone had to drive an hour from Fort Dodge to Storm Lake they would know precisely what we’re talking about with cellular black holes.

There are so many federal agencies (15) and funding programs (133) that the progress often gets lost in the shuffle, according to a May report from the Government Accounting Office.

“Despite numerous programs and federal investment of $44 billion from 2015 through 2020, millions of Americans still lack broadband, and communities with limited resources may be most affected by fragmentation,” the report said.

The Biden Administration is trying to put the NTIA at the point of the new infrastructure money.

Berke insists that the funds are a game-changer for isolated places struggling to connect with a bicoastal economy.

“This is eating the whole elephant,” he said.

Bully. He got me listening. But are 30 bucks really going to cut it, when the cable bill to the single-wide is well over $100 per month? It should help bring down costs by subsidizing those last miles to the hollers of Appalachia and empty places on the Great Plains where a cell tower casts no shadow. It is a start. It promises at least to get Internet to the household, a country mile from where we are now.

They called me out in the middle of corn fields and automated hog and poultry confinement buildings (Arnold the Pig and Foghorn Leghorn need Internet, too!) to get the word out along the gravel roads, I guess. It was awfully nice of Berke to take the time. He is trying to get everyone on the same megahertz, dialing them in through the maze of federal application.

It will take a couple years anyhow before the shovels hit the ground in the most forlorn places. There are five-year plans for states to write among the corn growers and cattlemen and telecom providers, and standards to meet for high-speed access. We keep on thinking that this is what will finally connect Iowa to Silicon Valley, and those coding jobs might finally sprout to keep the kids on the farm once they’ve seen Omaha. But the call keeps cutting out, and our cellphone provider just upped the bill with a “market adjustment.”

We’re in the wrong market, is the problem. That’s life out here. You start to doubt that $65 billion will actually get here, or improve life for a small town two hours away from anyplace you would want to meet. You get used to no public transportation, the smell of hog manure in the morning, and watching the paint peel on the village main street with one bar of service. It’s the price you pay for that rural lifestyle at $16 per hour.

Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, was broadcast in November 2021 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2022

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