Urban, rural areas remain digitally divided
High-speed internet doesn’t reach into most distant areas
It’s getting easier to find high-speed internet service in rural Wisconsin, yet there are still places where a robust online connection is as elusive as the Hodag, a mythical creature that legend says prowls the Northwoods.
What’s more, critics of government grants aimed at boosting the service across
the country say much of the money is being spent on internet speeds that are obsolete.
When the service providers focus on short-term profit, rather than building the best possible network, it’s not good for rural America, said Christopher Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps communities with internet access
issues.
“I don’t blame the providers any more than I blame tigers when they maul humans. They are what they are. The problem is that government policy lets them do it,” Mitchell said.
The Federal Communications Commission defines high-speed internet, or broadband, as an online connection capable of handling at least 25 megabits per second of download data. That’s more than adequate for streaming a video and downloading documents.
In Wisconsin, the average download speed is 37.7 megabits per second for a wired connection, according to new figures from Ookla, a Seattle technology firm.
That’s up 42% from June 2016, but it’s still slower than the national average of 69 megabits per second.
Ookla is the company behind Speedtest, a widely used tool for measuring internet speeds. The company says its figures are based on actual user experience from millions of U.S. consumers.
Not far from Madison, some rural residents say their internet service is so slow it barely registers on Speedtest, and that it can’t handle basic tasks such as video streaming or uploading documents.
Put bluntly, “we have really crappy internet,” said Paul Ohlrogge, who lives less than 20 miles west of Madison in rural Dane County.
In Dodgeville, a coffee shop is packed in the morning with people seeking to get online because they don’t have adequate internet service at their rural homes.
Broadband dead zones are a problem for small businesses and people who work from home, according to Ohlrogge, a community resource development specialist at the University of Wisconsin Extension in Dodgeville.
“We are losing entrepreneurs,” he said.
Nationwide, the federal government has poured billions of dollars into improving rural broadband service. Wisconsin is second only to California in the dollar amount allocated to states in the Connect America Fund II program administered by the FCC through 2020.
Under the program, three telecom companies will receive more than $570 million in government subsidies to expand internet service in rural Wisconsin, with a goal of reaching about 230,000 households.
CenturyLink Inc. will receive the most CAF II money in the state, $330 million, or $55 million per year, for projects aimed at reaching approximately 129,000 locations,typically households or businesses.
Frontier Communications will get $186 million, or $31 million per year, for 76,000 locations.
AT&T Inc. will get $54 million, or $9 million per year, for 24,000 locations.
The grant recipients have until the end of the year to complete 40% of their CAF II broadband expansions and until 2021 to finish the work.
Without government assistance, telecoms say they couldn’t afford to extend the service to sparsely populated areas because there aren’t enough homes and businesses to justify the costs.
“It certainly becomes more difficult when you have miles between customers instead of customers per mile,” said Bill Esbeck, executive director of the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association.
But critics of the CAF II grants say the government isn’t holding the telecoms to the FCC broadband standard of 25 megabits per second for downloads and three megabits for uploads. Instead, under CAF II, the standard is 10 megabits for downloads and one megabit for uploads.
That matters, a lot, because the service will be obsolete before it’s even installed, said Jay McCloskey with the Universal Broadband Access Coalition in Crawford County.
It’s the equivalent of paving over a dirt road and calling it a superhighway, according to McCloskey, who has fought, unsuccessfully, for a highspeed internet connection so that he can keep in touch with his business headquarters in Minneapolis.
“In our area, we aren’t going to see anything until 2021. And I find it unimaginable that the FCC is going to spend billions (nationwide) for service that’s lower than the bottom end of the standard set in 2015. It seems like a huge amount of money is being squandered on obsolete infrastructure,” McCloskey said.
A recent Bloomberg News report said only 55% of residents in rural U.S. locations had download speeds above 25 megabits per second, compared with 94% of urban residents.
For many people living in the country, a download speed of 10 megabits per second would be a huge improvement over what they have now. It’s good enough for streaming a high-definition video from Netflix, but it could get bogged down if several people in the same home were online simultaneously.
Andrew Petersen, vice president of TDS Telecom in Madison, said the 25 megabits per second standard is realistic for what many people want in their homes.
“To build a slow-speed network, in my mind, is penny wise and pound foolish,” Petersen said.
TDS, one of the largest local exchange telephone companies in the United States, has received millions of dollars in federal government assistance to expand broadband services in Wisconsin and other states.
The easy-to-serve areas have broadband now. It’s reaching the remaining 10% or 15% that’s difficult, Petersen said.
Ethoplex, an internet service provider based in Germantown, says it’s expanding into rural Wisconsin, including communities in the Fox Valley.
The company uses a new wireless technology to deliver speeds up to 500
megabits per second to individual homes and 1,000 megabits to apartment buildings and businesses.
Ethoplex says it can bring ultrafast internet to homes through its fixedwireless technology that is cheaper, per home, to install than wired service using fiber-optic cable.
“We calculate that it costs about one-tenth of what it would to connect homes via fiber,” said Ethoplex President and CEO Keefe John.
Last year, Ethoplex received a $7,886 state grant to provide internet service in the Town of Oconomowoc.
Government grants are “basically an accelerator” to get the service to rural communities faster, according to John.
“Hopefully the state legislature passes the budget amendment that has additional broadband funding. That would be significant for Wisconsin,” he said.