A Lesson Not Learned

I was once lucky enough to have interviewed a number of rural people who told me what it was like when they finally got electricity. Almost every person I talked to mentioned how life-changing it was to brightly illuminate their homes with electric lightbulbs. Rural electricity was largely funded by low-income loans to newly formed electric cooperatives. We took a different approach to stringing telephone copper in rural areas, with a mix of private and public investment. Since it’s now clear that broadband is the newest utility that homes need to participate in today’s economy, the federal government naturally got involved in funding rural fiber networks. Some of this was funded with subsidized loans, but a lot more has been accomplished through federal grant programs like the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, ReConnect, and the Capital Projects Fund. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program was supposed to be the big grant program that filled in the final gaps in rural fiber, and many State Broadband Offices were well on the way to fulfilling that goal. I’ve never understood why and how we lost the lessons we learned from rural electrification. I am certain that a lot of rural America would already have fiber today if the federal government had offered 40- or 50-year loans at 1 percent. Instead, the Federal Communications Commission chopped the rural landscape into Swiss cheese areas with the RDOF program, and other grant programs have tried to fit fiber projects around the messy jigsaw puzzle that was left over. I’m not sure that we could have designed a worse way to mess up the rural broadband landscape.