Trump Making More Empty Promises to Rural America on Broadband

Donald Trump pretended to care about rural America again this week by signing an executive order claiming to promote rural broadband. The order says the executive branch “will continue implementation” of existing law (which Barack Obama signed in 2012 and deemed a priority in a subsequent order on broadband deployment), “evaluate” an existing form, “expeditiously review and approve” requests, “report” on use of a form and processing of applications, and “prepare and provide” a summary report on those reports. Trump signed a related memo Monday telling the Secretary of the Interior to make a list of towers and other infrastructure on federal lands that broadband builders could use for rural broadband projects.

What will all that continuing and reporting and listing achieve? Nothing:

Congresswoman Cheri Bustos (D-IL) calls the order a hollow promise, with no specifics.

She said, “You can’t just say you want to do something and then not have a plan for how you’re going to pay for it, or how you’re going to roll that out.”

Roughly 39 percent of people in rural America don’t have high speed internet.

Shirley Bloomfield, who represents hundreds of smaller Internet providers, says that’s because it’s too expensive for companies to connect parts of the country to fast internet.

She says the new executive order alone doesn’t solve that problem.

Bloomfield said, “At the end of the day, it’s not what is actually getting that last mile out to the consumer. It’s not what is getting that wire out to the home, out to the farm, out to the barn” [“Despite Executive Order, Experts Say Rural America Will Keep Waiting for High-Speed Internet,” Gray via KOTA-TV, 2018.01.12].

Experience ag commodities trader John Tsitrian says the rural broadband Trump muttered about to the Farm Bureau this week only shows Trump doesn’t understand modern farming:

It wasn’t long before it became clear that Trump hasn’t got much of a clue about what’s going on in farm and ranch country when he promised “I will take the first steps to expand access to broadband internet in rural America so you can compete.”  Cripes, when I was trading and brokering cattle and grain (both in physical and futures markets) back in the ’90s just about every producer I knew in South Dakota had access to real time news and pricing information via satellite or hardwired internet.  They were in a position to compete with the best of ’em when it came to “price discovery”–the technical term for market prices, both on exchanges or at local elevators and sale barns.  Fact is, after 12 years of trading options and ag futures in Chicago, I re-located to the beautiful Black Hills because the information technology revolution gave me the same access to markets in Rapid City, South Dakota, that I had at the intersection of Jackson and La Salle Streets in the heart of the Chicago Loop’s financial district.

Trump’s promise of better access to information is meaningless when it comes to dealing with the real problems in the farm and ranch belts [John Tsitrian, “Grain and Livestock Futures All Down This Morning After Trump’s Talk to the American Farm Bureau Yesterday,” The Constant Commoner, 2018.01.09].

Many rural areas still lack access, but the obstacles to rural broadband far exceed Trump’s Monday penstrokes:

“This is certainly something that’s long been on the list of reasonable things that you ought to do, but it’s unlikely to move the needle that much because the basic problem for broadband in rural areas is that you don’t have a sufficient way to return the cost,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at DC-based digital rights group Public Knowledge, over the phone.

Folks in rural communities don’t have access to high-speed internet because it costs a lot of money to install fiber across miles of remote countryside. If, after that initial investment, a company is going to only get two or three customers using that infrastructure, as is often the case in rural areas, it doesn’t make sense financial for these companies to build. So they don’t. And efforts from Big Telecom lobbyists to prevent communities from building their own internet, either as a public utility or part of a local co-op, have sabotaged the few options these people have [Kaleigh Rogers, “Trump Signs Two Rural Broadband Executive Orders That Will Barely Move the Needle,” Motherboard, 2018.01.10].

One tech expert notes that Trump’s order could just be providing cover for the FCC to rebrand slower service as “broadband”:

…one of the goals of Ajit Pai, the current FCC chair, is to redefine what constitutes broadband. The FCC’s current broadband definition only refers to wireline/fixed service and mandates a 25Mbps down/3Mbps up connection. Under Ajit Pai, the FCC wants to define a new, significantly slower standard for wireless service (10Mbps down/1Mbps up). Having access to either type of service would now count as broadband, even though wireline/fixed service is vastly cheaper, scales to multiple devices without additional costs beyond a Wi-Fi router, doesn’t incur the same penalties for using more than one’s allotted amount of bandwidth per month, and offers far faster service.

…If the definition of broadband is lowered to include everyone who has at least a 10/1 wireless connection, it’ll lead to a steep drop in the number of US citizens who lack broadband service. If the CDC defines obesity as “Only applicable to people weighing more than 500 pounds,” it’ll also lead to a steep drop in the number of obese people in the United States. Same principle. Since the text of both executive orders refers specifically to using the powers of the federal government to increase the number of people with access to broadband, and changing the definition of broadband makes more people have it, everyone in Washington DC can pat each other on the back for their efforts [Joel Hruska, “Trump’s Executive Orders Boosting Rural Broadband Won’t Stop FCC Sabotage,” Extreme Tech, 2018.01.11].

South Dakota state government offers some maps from 2014 showing where broadband is available in our rural state, but the Obama stimulus money that funded that project ran out, so the state has “greatly reduced” the broadband information it collects and offers. Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s broadband task force released this week concludes that it will cost $1.4 billion to get real broadband to every Minnesota household. Donald Trump has yet to put any money where his rural broadband mouth is.