At the state level, claims of unfairness
Under the Connect America Fund requirements, grant recipients had a great deal of latitude in where they deployed upgrades. They were allowed, for example, to bypass thinly populated sections of rural counties and make up the difference in other CAF II-eligible areas that had more customers.
It’s really hurt places like Price County, according to Hallstrand, who says the government subsidies should be used to cover the areas most in need of better service before the money’s spent in other places.
“That’s how rural broadband,” he said.
In one rural Wisconsin county after another, Connect America Fund II has left a trail of skepticism and frustration. Many communities have initiated their own broadband expansion projects, seeking state grants and local partnerships, because they haven’t seen much help from the federal government and big-name service providers.
“Marathon County has decided we aren’t going to wait for some mythical program to increase broadband access,” said Melinda Osterberg, a member of the county’s internet task force. “We will just continue trying to solve the problem on our own.”
Randy Scholz, former Lincoln County administrative coordinator, spent months trying to learn what Frontier was doing with the CAF II subsidies in his county.
“There were places in the middle of nowhere that got service ... but it didn’t seem to follow any logical pattern,” Scholz said.
He felt as if he was tracking a moving target.
“I went out and told everybody that service was coming, and when it didn’t show up, it made me look pretty bad,” he said.
Karen Thayer, a Jackson County supervisor, said she didn’t know where CenturyLink was using the federal money it could have received for 4,212 locations in her county.
“It’s pretty bad out here,” Thayer said last fall, adding that there were times when she didn’t even use her computer because it took so long to get online.
Her cellphone service wasn’t much better.
It was a similar story in parts of Sauk County where state Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, is from. He’s on Gov. Tony Evers’ broadband task force.
Federal government projects, he said, “often went for the low-hanging fruit,” where there were higher population densities and a better return on the service provider’s investment.
“I think if you look at it statewide, there was an impact,” Marklein said. “But in my district, years later, we still
America
gets have areas where there’s no cellphone service, no internet, nothing.”
Not much faith in the FCC
It’s much the same story nationwide. There’s an interactive map of where service from federal programs like the Connect America Fund was deployed. But independent testing has shown that even mediocre speed requirements weren’t always met, according to Dawson, from North Carolina.
“If the FCC really wants to do the right thing, it will ask for local feedback,” he said. “There are local officials across rural America who would love to verify if these upgrades brought anything close” to the minimum speeds.
Some states have confronted broadband providers on their own for not delivering the required service under federal projects. Last fall, Mississippi issued an investigative subpoena for AT&T to produce records about its use of nearly $284 million in Connect America Fund grants in the state.
The subpoena sought detailed information on the company’s claim to have brought wireless internet access to 133,000 homes and businesses after a state investigation found discrepancies in what was promised and what was actually available to consumers.
“AT&T has pocketed $283,780,632 of public money with a promise to expand internet service, yet they refuse to answer the most basic questions of a regulator surrounding the use of these dollars and the actual success of their plans,” Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley said in a news release.
In some instances, AT&T acknowledged, it may not have the build-out requirements. But the company said it never deceived regulators or consumers.
After receiving guarantees that certain information would be kept confidential, AT&T agreed to comply with Mississippi’s records request. However the dispute remains unsettled, Presley told the Journal Sentinel in June.
Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission has awarded 268 broadband expansion grants totaling more than $72 million since 2014. The latest round, in March, covered 44 counties and leveraged $49 million in private and local government matching money, according to the agency.
Often, the distribution of the money comes down to whether a broadband provider is even interested in a community. But some local officials, and at least one state legislator, have complained that decisions have been based on political and industry connections.
For 2018, one-third of the state broadband grant funding was aimed at a couple of projects in Madison-area communities in Dane County. None of the eight applicants from state Sen. Janet Bewley’s district, in the northwest part of the state, got a dime.
“Not sure about you, but I think we’re a lot more underserved than people who live in Dane County,” said Bewley, a Democrat from Ashland.
A screening panel that made recommendations to the public service commissioners rated two projects from her district in the top 10 list of applicants, according to the senator.
“Unfortunately, the politically appointed commissioners rejected those recommendations,” she said.
Moreover, she complained that commissioners appointed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, favored three major broadband companies.
“Those companies just happen to employ 10 lobbyists here in Wisconsin,” Bewley said.
Nevertheless, there are many examples of very rural areas winning state grants. One of them was Cloverland, about 25 miles east of Superior along state Highway 13 and the Brule River State Forest.
With only a handful of people per square mile, it would have seemed that Cloverland hardly stood a chance of convincing an internet company to spend hundreds of thousands to bring service to the area. Yet with dogged persistence, a handful of folks helped win a $443,000 state grant in the spring of 2020.
“I was astonished,” said Michael Spencer, a former stockbroker who spearheaded the campaign urging the Public Service Commission to subsidize the cost of delivering broadband, over fiber-optic cable, to 55 homes and six small businesses.
Spencer went door-to-door with a petition seeking support. Only two people refused to sign: one man who lived in the woods without electricity and another who had no interest in going online for anything.
The grant went to Norvado Inc., based in Cable, which said it was putting $190,000 of its money into the $633,000 project scheduled to be finished this year.
“I can tell you that a couple of folks here were pretty shocked,” said Norvado CEO Chad Young, a member of Evers’ broadband task force.
Bewley cited the grant for Cloverland, which is in her district, as an example of what’s needed for places where market forces alone won’t bridge the gaps. “It may cause people to gasp, but it’s a onetime investment and you’re done,” the senator said.
PSC Chairwoman Rebecca Cameron
Valcq said there’s sometimes no other way to get service to small communities.
“I get a little excited when someone says that doesn’t seem like a very good use of grant dollars,” she said. “Tell that to the people who had to put their kids in the car and drive them 12 miles to the nearest public Wi-Fi spot so they could do their schoolwork.”
However, measuring the success of state broadband expansion grants through publicly available documents can be difficult. A Journal Sentinel review of the records found that some were thin on information or it was redacted from public view.
The Public Service Commission doesn’t routinely test to verify the speeds and quality of service of grantfunded projects but says it follows up in other ways.
“We can call customers and businesses and ask if they’re satisfied,” said state Broadband Director Jaron McCallum.
‘We are just asking for accountability’
State officials ought to demand more accountability, according to Marklein and other state lawmakers including state Sen. Jeff Smith, D-Eau Claire, and state Rep. Rob Summerfield, R-Bloomer.
Smith proposed legislation that would allow consumers to seek a refund if their internet provider didn’t live up to advertised speeds.
“We are just asking for accountability, truth in advertising,” he said.
He also authored a bill that would task the Legislative Audit Bureau with biennial performance audits of the state broadband expansion grants.
Summerfield has proposed giving funding preference to projects pledging speeds of 900 Mbps or higher, a move that would help level the playing field between rural areas and cities for years to come.
“If we’re going to be spending the public’s money, we should make sure it’s for high-quality service,” he said.
Yet some changes wouldn’t come easily. In 2011, the telecommunications industry in Wisconsin was largely deregulated under the Walker administration. Supporters said it freed companies from a maze of arcane regulations based on an era of landline telephones, and that they needed breathing room to keep pace with changing technologies and markets.
But now, it’s hard to tell how bad the rural internet situation is because there’s no reliable data and little accountability of government programs, said Barry Orton, professor emeritus in the telecommunications program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“There’s no oversight left,” he said.