Burying cable may not be best way to boost internet access

Despite the best efforts of many large companies, it is looking more likely that working from home will be a competitive benefit for the modern professional worker. As us millennials approach middle age, the high cost of living in a large expensive city with a long commute is becoming less and less attractive, especially for those of us who are starting to have or desire to have families.

For New Mexico, this offers a good opportunity to tackle one of the largest issues facing the state, which is the loss of young professional workers and college graduates.

In order to capitalize on a working from home future to help keep young New Mexicans in the state or get those who have moved away to come back we need to drastically improve internet connectivity — particularly in the more rural areas of the state, who are suffering the most from population loss. There is a lot of work being done across the state to invest in New Mexico’s broadband access, but as companies and the state look to find more ways to get cable in the ground, maybe it is better to promote better access to wireless internet.

Many of the large cellphone carriers such as Verizon and T-Mobile have begun offering home internet using their 5G service. Expanding access to 5G would likely be less expensive, less taxing on the land, and easier than laying cable. The services offered are often cheaper to consumers than DSL, cable, and satellite internet and only moderately more expensive than dial-up.

Expansion of 5G would also mean greater access to cellphone services and communications, which would make living in more remote parts of the state easier and safer. In my city of Española, access to these 5G networks provided some reasonable and much-needed competition to the only broadband option in the city.

New Mexico’s digital equity issues are a major problem of our time. As we saw with the pandemic, it is something we definitely need to look into. However, New Mexico’s unique challenges as a rural state need to be taken into consideration when planning the infrastructure opportunities that lie ahead of us. We need to examine if burying cable really is the best use of the resources available. Also as smartphones continue to outpace traditional desktop and laptop computing, are we really future-proofing the state’s needs?

I hope municipalities, counties, and the state consider the options before them when trying to bridge the digital divide and educate themselves on the issue. Many mistakes were made during broadband’s initial introduction to the state.

We need to make sure New Mexicans are getting the most access for the dollars spent and avoid creating artificial monopolies if possible. It took until 2008 before my parents had access to internet faster than dial-up, let’s not get stuck again.