Sean Staats "A Fish Swallowed Google" by Sean Staats, Paden City Elementary, West Virginia -- Will rural communities likewise go for the company's latest funding challenge? In mid-February Google announced plans to create several fiber to the home (FTTH) networks in communities as pilot projects to show the world what hundreds of megabits per second of broadband can achieve. As with the federal stimulus program, communities large and small are gearing up for another broadband lottery worth millions.

As explained in this Yonder article, public-private broadband partnerships are complicated because such different entities often have opposing goals. Public and private sector partners both need to understand fully each other’s requirements, addressing potential conflicts from the start. This precaution applies to Google, too.

As communities are jumping in response to Google’s request for information (RFI), should rural areas apply? Sandie Terry, IT Director of Franklin County, VA, for one, is doubtful.

“We have such a limited amount of time and resources we’re thinking twice about how appealing our community will be to Google,” states Terry. “We have a lot of unserved people in mountainous areas and other difficult to reach places. Google says they want to do projects where they can deploy quickly, and that’s not us.”

Economic Research Service The higher your income, the more likely it is that you have broadband at home. Still, however, rural households lag.

We realize that outmigration among rural youth is a problem for many rural communities and there is some hope that comprehensive broadband build-out in rural areas could provide rural places with the infrastructure they need to provide the jobs that would give those young people a way to stay.

But broadband build-out alone will not solve the employment woes of rural areas. As long as there continues to be a marked gap between the education levels of urban and rural citizens, we cannot expect highly-skilled, well-paying telework jobs to transfer to rural areas of their own accord.

There is the possibility, however, that rural broadband build-out could facilitate not only the infrastructure needed to bring telework positions to rural communities, but also provide the means for rural residents to enroll in distance learning courses that will help them to become more competitive in the national and global marketplace.

Why distance learning? Historically, rural communities have sought to close the rural/urban education gap by sending their most promising young students to far-away colleges and universities for post-secondary instruction.  On the face of it, this is a seemingly sound plan.  However, this strategy has a few crucial shortcomings.