Saturday, November 21, 2009
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Broadband and Tech

Broadband and Tech
USA Today Finds Rural Americans Want Broadband
06/09/2009

Monday was the last day the Federal Communications Commission would accept comments on its national broadband plan. According to one website, the agency was "awash in advice from companies, industry associations, and public interest groups."  PC Magazine has a rundown here of some of what the big players are advising.  You'll note that the PC Mag article does not mention rural. Verizon does, however, say that the priority of any national broadband plan should be providing service to the 10% of Americans without access. Google is most interested in more fiber being laid.

Meanwhile, USA Today ran a story headlined, "Rural Americans Long to be Linked." Reporter Leslie Cauley heads to Plains, Texas, and finds people who feel broadband has become a service that ought to be available to everyone. "Just because we live in rural America doesn't mean we shouldn't have broadband," says Roper, a third-generation peanut farmer. "We're all Americans. We shouldn't be treated less than anyone else."

Cauley reports that the "biggest argument in favor of rural broadband, however, can be boiled down to two words: job creation." She then finds the various ways rural residents rely on broadband -- on the ranch, at the library, taking on-line courses. 

 

Broadband and Tech
New York Times Discovers Rural TV Loss...Almost
06/06/2009

Art Menius and his TV

In case you didn't believe it when the Yonder's Mimi Pickering reported that millions of people — many in rural America — will be without television when a 1,000 broadcaster shut off their analog signal and begin beaming the latest news, weather and degrading reality show in digital, the New York Times reports Saturday morning that, yes, "Millions Face Blank Screens in TV Switch."  The Times' Stephen Labaton wrote, "Michael J. Copps, the acting head of the Federal Communications Commission, said that the people most likely to lose reception are society’s most vulnerable — lower-income families, the elderly, the handicapped and homes where little or no English is spoken. The transition will also hit inner-city and rural areas hardest, he said."

The Nielsen Company figures that three million homes won't have TV when the switch takes place. Millions more will have bad reception. Apparently, the area to be hardest hit is Puerto Rico. One of the problems is procrastination. People put off doing their chores, and here the chore is acquiring a set-top box that will allow an analog television to show a digital signal. 

What Pickering reported, but Labaton does not, is that new broadcast signals may not reach many rural homes at all. The digital signal is weaker and many rural residents will only be able to tap into a useable signal with special equipment. Meanwhile, there are more than 4,000 translators that will need to be upgraded or signals to rural areas will be cut off entirely. 

 

Broadband and Tech
Broadband Mapping and Connected Nation
06/04/2009

Congress has set aside $350 million to map who has broadband connections and who doesn't across the country. Since the map will help the federal government decide where to spend $7 billion in broadband stimulus money, plenty of people see this project as key to who will get the biggest chunk of the money Congress set aside to extend broadband. And that brings us to Connected Nation, an organization that began delivering broadband to rural Kentucky.

The Wall Street Journal's Amy Schatz wrote recently that Connected Nation is the biggest provider of broadband coverage maps — and is backed by the biggest of the big telecom outfits (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T). Put simply, Schatz reports, "Critics complain it uses unverifiable confidential information from phone and cable companies to draw its maps, and worry Connected Nation will use the maps to steer stimulus funds toward its big corporate sponsors, at the expense of smaller players or poorly served areas."

There are critics aplenty. Schatz quotes those in Kentucky who are lobbying against the way CN does its mapping. They say CN overestimates where broadband is available. (See CN's map of broadband availability in Kentucky above; Red means no broadband.) Art Brodsky, with the advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Schatz, "I think it's a huge conflict of interest to turn our mapping over to the companies that stand to benefit from the results." (Read Brodsky's long indictment of Connected Nation here.) Meanwhile, Stacey Higgenbotham writes that some people balk at paying $350 million for a map "given that the carriers already know exactly which areas they service."

Broadband and Tech
First, Interstate Highways, Now Broadband
06/01/2009

The Federal Communications Commission chair didn't provide a plan for bringing broadband to rural America, but he did point to a way.

Broadband and Tech | Main Street Economics
Verizon Abandons Rural America, But Yonder 40 Soars
05/24/2009

Yonder 40 stock indexVerizon sheds its rural phone lines even as the Yonder 40 stock index outshines its big city rivals.

Broadband and Tech
Frontier snatches up more rural customers
05/15/2009

Frontier Communications

The existence of federal subsidies for rural broadband providers may have played a role in Frontier Communication's acquisition of Verizon's rural landline customers.

Frontier made the purchase May 13 and a day later said it would apply for broadband stimulus funding made available by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009.

Unlike larger telecommunications companies that have been trying to shed customers in rural areas (where profit margins are said to be narrower), Frontier has been moving into rural in a big way.

"We will be the largest pure rural communications provider of voice, broadband and video services in the U.S.," said Frontier's chairman and CEO, Maggie Wilderotter in a press release about the deal with Verizon.

StimulatingBroadband.com reports that this "pure rural play" could give Frontier a competitive advantage if it helps the company tap government funding to provide broadband to customers who currently can't get it. It's not just that grants reduce the cost to build new networks. Rules in the USDA's Rural Utilities Service funding program, for example, could limit the competition Frontier might face if it gets grants or loans from the agency.

Another site, telecompetitor.com, covers the story in piece entitled "Rise of the rural 'super' carrier."

 

Broadband and Tech
Is Rural the Home of "Digital Dirt Roads?"
05/06/2009

Digital Dirtroad

Remember terms like "information superhighway" and "Internet onramp"? Well, now there's a new transportation analogy for discussing Internet access: "digital dirt road."

Like real dirt roads, you're more likely to find them in rural America than in the suburbs, according to an online report. (A 2005 survey found that 24 percent of rural adults went online with high-speed access at home, compared with 39 percent of urban and suburban adults.)

The folks at Internet for Everyone (a broadband access campaign) spent a week touring rural North Carolina visiting people who get on the Internet the old fashioned way – through dialup modems. They present their findings in Five Days on a Digital Dirt Road."

The report interviews a farmer, freelance writer, high school student, bed and breakfast owner, and others who describe the frustrations and limits of trying to do their work and studies on a slow Internet connection.

Writer Brooks Townes of Weaverville, N.C., describes dialup as like driving a dump truck instead of a Ferrari. He can't download information fast enough to do his work.

Kim Foushee of Person County says it's more like driving a Pinto. She says government needs to get more involved in building out high-speed access for rural areas.

The arguments are familiar. Lack of high-speed access limits economic and educational opportunity. While we might debate exactly how broadband contributes to economic development, there's no refuting the experiences of these rural residents who are frustrated by slow download speeds. But the folks featured in this report may have a hard time seeing it. The site includes well-edited videos that put names and faces on the Internet access story. And, ironically, probably make the files too big to download easily via dialup.

Broadband and Tech
Australia Rolls Out $43 Billion Broadband Plan
05/04/2009

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (above) plans to spend $43 billion extending internet broadband across the nation. That's $43 billion — six times the amount President Obama wants to spend in the U.S. The Australian newspaper's Malcolm Colless warns, however, that "there is real political danger for the Rudd Government." The "more sensitive issue" in Rudd's plan is the cost of access to consumers. "For this project to fly," Colless writes, "there cannot be a perceived cost differential between those consumers living in high-density metropolitan areas and those living in sparsely populated regional sectors."

The so-called Ruddnet plan is to provide 100 megabit per second fiber optic broadband to 90 percent of Australians through homes, schools and workplaces. The other 10 percent — Colless says it will be 15 percent — are in far-flung rural Australian and will be served by wireless and satellite, which will be slower.

Rural Australia is much stronger politically than rural America, and it shows in how The Australian writes about Ruddnet. "Creating a level playing field across the country on price and service should be a priority for the Government as it fleshes out the back-of-the-envelope costing of this mammoth project," Colless writes. "The complexity of the Ruddnet project ensures that it will encounter big obstacles along the way. But alienating the rural vote does not have to be one of them. On the contrary, the speedy introduction of competitively priced satellite broadband services to regional Australia could be a vote winner for Rudd. It would demonstrate an understanding and compassion for the communications problems faced by regional communities, something they would say has been lacking in previous governments."

Broadband and Tech
Rural Broadband Connections Beating Urban
05/01/2009
A telecom industry research firm (Pivot Media) says that the number of new broadband connections is slowing down in both rural and urban communities. Throughout most of 2008, rural areas were adding broadband connections at a faster rate than urban regions, according to Pivot Media's survey. But the rate of growth across the country slowed significantly in both rural and urban areas — a function of both the economic slowdown and the fact that rapid increases in broadband connections couldn't be sustained. By the fourth quarter of 2008, rural connections were about 2 percent above those in the third quarter. In urban areas, however, connections were up 3 percent over the fourth quarter. Pivot Media reports that the "heyday of broadband growth culminated in 2006..." By 2008, "we began to see much slower growth in both urban and rural markets." The slowdown was particularly acute in rural areas. In the first quarter of 2008, new rural broadband connections were running 26% above the first quarter of 2007. By the fourth quarter, rural broadband growth was 12.4 percent above the same quarter in '07. Both rural and urban markets were seeing a decline in landlines. This is a slow, steady change in the way people use phones. In the fourth quarter of 2008, there were 7 percent fewer landlines in rural areas than the year before. In urban areas, the decline from 2007 was over 10 percent. All together, rural carriers are doing better than urban ones. They are gaining broadband users at a faster rate and they are losing fewer landlines.
Broadband and Tech | Growth and Development
Does it Take More than Broadband? Well, Duh...
04/26/2009

Lebanon, Virginia, on July 4th The Washington Post discovers that there may be something more to economic development in rural America than just broadband.

Daily Yonder | Keep It Rural
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