LOTS OF SPENDING, LITTLE RURAL PROGRESS
Bad maps, lax oversight hinder internet projects
Six years ago, Jeff Hallstrand’s home in Price County appeared close to finally receiving a much-needed boost in internet service.
The federal government had announced that more than 129,000 homes and small businesses across rural Wisconsin were eligible for an upgrade under a $330 million grant awarded to broadband provider CenturyLink.
Hallstrand, a county supervisor, had worked for 30 years for CenturyLink and another internet company before branching out to start his own engineering business. But at his home in the Town of Ogema, he had speeds not much better than a dial-up modem from the 1990s.
The map of locations eligible for improved service showed that he might finally get on the right side of the digital divide.
Today, nothing has changed. The grant left it up to CenturyLink to pick which locations to upgrade, and Hallstrand got nothing.
“The internet that’s at my place today was installed 20 years ago,” he said.
Last fall, he had a daughter who was a junior in college and another daughter who was a sophomore in high school trying to do online classes from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It just doesn’t work,” he said. The Federal Communications Commission has said that nationwide around 14 million people lack access to broadband, also known as high-speed internet. However, the firm Broadband Now, which helps consumers find service, estimates it’s closer to 42 million. And although Microsoft Corp. doesn’t have the ability to measure everyone’s actual internet connection, the tech giant says approximately 120 million Americans aren’t using the internet at true broadband speeds of at least 25megabit-per-second downloads and 3 Mbps uploads — a further indication of how many people have been left behind.
In education, jobs, telemedicine and entertainment, large swaths of the countryside are stifled in basic tasks such as uploading a video or taking an online class.
Today, many believe the nation is at a pivotal moment as President Joe Biden’s administration has proposed spending $65 billion for broadband expansion.
Biden’s initiative, part of his $1.2 trillion American Jobs Plan, would prioritize the creation of future-proof networks, “so we finally reach 100 percent coverage,” the White House said in a recent statement.
Hallstrand and others across rural America have heard this before.
In 2004, President George W. Bush called for affordable, high-speed internet access for all Americans by 2007. It was, he said, essential to the nation’s economic growth.
In 2010, President Barack Obama promoted a National Broadband Plan as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The 360-page plan outlined 208 recommendations. “It is a call to action,” the document said, “to replace talk with practical results.”
In 2019, President Donald Trump unveiled the $20 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, saying that farmers “just haven’t been treated properly” when it comes to internet access. Billions had already been spent on broadband.
None of the efforts under any of the administrations succeeded, and some of the reasons were fairly straightforward. The data on who has broadband — and who doesn’t — has been flawed. Some of the upgrades quickly became obsolete. There’s been limited accountability.
“We have given away $40 billion in the last 10 years ... and haven’t solved the problem,” said Tom Wheeler, who was FCC chairman in Obama’s administration. “I always thought the definition of insanity was doing things the same way over and over and believing that, somehow, something will change.”
And so the digital divide, which some say has become a chasm, remains.
Inadequate mapping of the problem
The FCC can’t readily identify where high-speed internet is missing in rural areas because there are no accurate maps of address-by-address coverage.
If even one home or business in a census block has access, the agency considers the entire block served. In rural areas, some of those blocks, not to be confused with the larger census tracts, cover hundreds of square miles. Many places are shown as having broadband when, in reality, they don’t.
“That means in the United States we lack an honest picture of the communities that are consigned to the wrong side of the digital divide, and the people and places most at risk of falling further behind,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said last summer in a memo of dissent over the agency’s rush to spend billions on rural internet projects based on flawed maps.
Rosenworcel, a Democrat, labeled the rollout of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, right before the presidential election last fall, a premature move that smacked of politics.
“We are spending down our resources before even taking the time to get (the maps) right. This is not the way to do it. We need maps before money, and data before deployment.”
The mapping system should have been fixed years ago, according to Rosenworcel, who in January was named the commission’s acting chairwoman by Biden.
In March 2020, Rosenworcel testified in a congressional subcommittee hearing
Kathleen Blomberg, left, the owner of the small High Point resort, says, about the internet, "It's always slow. I'm used to it, but people from away are not." She is chatting with guest Rowena Corbett July 27 at her resort wedged between two lakes in rural Price County near Ogema. Corbett, is a longtime guest from Palm Springs, Calif., who is staying at the resort for six weeks. that it was a significant but solvable problem. “We could radically improve the state of our maps” in three to six months, she said.
Last December, Congress gave the FCC nearly $100 million largely for that purpose. The agency said it has started the process, although it hasn’t disclosed when the task will be completed or exactly how it will be done.
“We have a better map of the Milky Way” than of who doesn’t have broadband, said Christopher Ali, an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.
Repeating some of the same mistakes
The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund touted by Trump aims to reach 5 million U.S. locations through subsidies provided over 10 years.
In Wisconsin, 14 companies were awarded nearly $374 million for 240,546 locations. Of those, the two biggest awards went to Charter Communications at $168 million for 143,269 locations and Ltd. Broadband, $189 million for 88,070 locations.
The FCC says nearly all the sites, nationwide, will get speeds of at least 100 megabit-per-second downloads and 20 Mbps uploads, a huge improvement for most rural areas. In fact, the FCC says about 85% will get gigabit speeds of 1,000 Mbps.
However, “a promise made is not the same as a promise kept,” cautioned Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff who directed the writing of the National Broadband Plan in 2009.
Nationally, many of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund locations aren’t even in rural areas, the consumer watchdog group Free Press found in an analysis of the program. What’s more, about $700 million was designated for questionable sites.
For example, a California broadband company won a subsidy to serve Terranea, a Los Angeles County resort popular with tourists wanting to take pictures of the oceanside cliffs, even if they can’t afford upward of $650 a night for a hotel room. But the resort, which has hosted technology conferences, already has ample broadband, said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press.
“I’ve visited the public restaurant at Terranea and paid $18 for a sandwich so I could enjoy the view,” he said.
A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund found that Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture won subsidies for Chicago locations such as the Museum District’s Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium, Grant
Park and parts of the Lincoln Park Zoo, even the University of Illinois-Chicago’s medical campus.
SpaceX was awarded an annual subsidy to bring the internet to parking lots near the Mall of America, and to serve the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the Journal Sentinel found.
“While the FCC continues to ignore the plight of the urban poor, it’s giving Elon Musk nearly a billion in subsidies, a significant portion of it to serve urban airports, parking lots and dog parks,” Turner said.
The grant process was doomed before it ever got started, said Doug Dawson, a nationally recognized internet consultant from North Carolina. “If the FCC doesn’t figure out a way to cancel the worst of the grant awards, when we look back on this, we’ll find that half or more of the money was wasted.”
The awards will undergo scrutiny before the checks are written, Rosenworcel told the Journal Sentinel in a recent interview. “It’s going to require us to carefully assess the preliminary commitments that were made,” she said.
Ajit Pai, who in January stepped down as chairman of the FCC under Trump, did not respond to a Journal Sentinel interview request. But in a public hearing last fall he defended his decision to go forward with the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund before the presidential election.
“What you’ve heard from some, including some of the FCC, is that we should do absolutely nothing ... unless the maps are perfect,” Pai said at the hearing. “But to me, people who are on the wrong side of the digital divide, who we know are on the wrong side, have waited long enough.”
‘Such a waste of public dollars’
The program’s flaws are a sequel to earlier mistakes.
In 2015 under Obama, the Connect America Fund II program only required grant recipients to deliver service of 10 Mbps downloads and 1 Mbps uploads — not even half the FCC’s definition of broadband, and not nearly enough bandwidth for many families today.
Those speeds were “such a waste of public dollars,” said Bernadine Joselyn, public policy director for the Blandin Foundation, a Grand Rapids, Minnesota, nonprofit focused on rural issues. “If you’re going to make an investment in broadband, you want it to be future proof, especially with public funds. I think it’s reasonable to expect it would benefit a community for decades.”
The effort initially granted 10 companies, combined, more than $1.5 billion annually to build broadband infrastructure over a six-year period through 2020.
Nationwide, 4 million homes and small businesses were supposed to be covered.
In Wisconsin, CenturyLink, Frontier Communications and AT&T, combined, were awarded about $572 million over the program’s duration to upgrade internet service at 230,451 locations.
CenturyLink, in a letter to the FCC in January, said it “may not have reached” its build-out requirements in 23 states including Wisconsin.
Frontier told the agency in January it “may not yet have met” the full requirements in Wisconsin and 16 other states.
The company, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 2020, blamed the pandemic.
CAF II grant recipients could face fines for not meeting deadlines or the program’s requirements, according to the FCC, but industry experts said they weren’t aware of any enforcement actions.
Moreover, the program granted the companies a seventh year of funding, for 2021, and additional time to complete projects delayed by the pandemic.
The seventh year of money was “the most blatant handout of federal broadband funds I’ve ever seen,” Dawson said, “because these funds won’t improve broadband for any rural customer. This will just help AT&T make its dividend payments and help ease Frontier coming out of bankruptcy.”
Frontier declined to answer questions from the Journal Sentinel. AT&T said it met the CAF II deadlines, and under the program, delivered service to more than 24,500 homes and small businesses in rural Wisconsin.
“I think it was a good first step,” AT&T Wisconsin President Scott VanderSanden said. “The places where there’s absolutely nothing available are getting to be fewer and fewer.”
‘It was hugely disappointing’
Hallstrand, in Price County, says he pays for 1.5 Mbps download speeds but only gets around 0.6 Mbps, barely usable for streaming a low-resolution video.
Rocky Carlson has had a similar experience.
“It was hugely disappointing,” he said, that CenturyLink did not upgrade the service at his home in Price County.
He suspects that most of the improvements in the area went to towns such as Park Falls, where there are more people per square mile.
A few miles away, in the Town of Hill, Jeff Ulrich gets less than 1 Mbps downloads even though he pays $90 a month for better 1.5 Mbps service from CenturyLink. His address is in a CAF II eligible area but didn’t get an upgrade.
Ulrich is a UW Health regional program manager. He can work from home — barely — but video conferences aren’t possible.
“It gets so pixelated, it just stops,” he said.
In Price County, UW Health faces a large elderly population that is scattered and has trouble getting to see doctors in person. Better broadband connections would mean easier remote visits.
“It could save lives,” Ulrich said. During the pandemic, there were times when the parking lot at the local library was nearly filled with people sitting in their cars trying to catch a Wi-Fi signal from inside the closed building.
“Sometimes the fixes put in place are like placing a Band-Aid on an arterial bleed,” Ulrich said.
The Town of Hill is home to High Point Village, a resort with five chaletstyle cottages and the Hill of Beans restaurant and coffee shop. The resort is next to Timm’s Hill, the highest point in Wisconsin and a popular destination for hikers.
But for all the beauty of being secluded in the woods, it’s not the place to stay for guests that need much of an internet connection.
Owner Kathleen Blomberg has managed to get at least some service to two of the five cottages closest to the main lodge. But not the other three, and it’s cost her some reservations when people learned there was barely any internet.
“It’s just always been slow,” she said. “I’m used to it, but young people, and people in general, are used to things happening right now.”
CenturyLink, in July, said it was on track to upgrade service at 130,000 rural Wisconsin locations by the end of the year. In Price County, the company said, it will have brought faster speeds to nearly 3,000 homes and businesses — short of the 3,810 locations eligible for an upgrade.