Christopher Ali: Is Broadband Like Getting Bran Flakes to the Home?
Christopher Ali discusses his solutions to bridge the rural-urban digital divide in his most recent book, “Farm Fresh Broadband.”
By Christopher Ali
During my rural broadband road trip, one provider recalled a story of trying to convince his community to adopt fiber-to-the-home. In response, someone said, “You mean like bran flakes at my house every morning? What do you mean fiber to my home?”
In today’s connected world, broadband is as essential as bran flakes—one item in a nutritional toolkit of rural community development. Current policies do not encourage us to eat our digital fiber. Instead, money, markets, politics, and profits will define the forthcoming pages in this book. We will delve deep into the market failures of rural communication; we will learn how federal policies prioritize large telecommunications companies at the expense of small ISPs and co-ops.
We will see how many of these companies deliver only the legally required minimum speeds rather than treat these minimums as a floor to build on.
As much as rural broadband policy is a story of failure, it is also one of ingenuity and innovation in America’s heartland. It is here where we find some of the successes of rural broadband—like Luverne, Minnesota, seat of Rock County, whose leaders risked a $1 million bond to bring fiber-optic broadband to the county, or the PRTC (originally the People’s Rural Telephone Cooperative), which brought fiber-optic broadband to McKee, Kentucky, one of the poorest communities in the state.
These are the local companies and cooperatives more interested in serving their members and communities with a public service than earning a short-term return on investment. And there are many who are in need of these providers, like farmers and growers, who are all too often left out of the conversation, but for whom broadband to the farm would mean a new era of agriculture.
The story of rural broadband in the United States is equally one of failure and one of promise. “Farm Fresh Broadband” captures both, all the while reminding the reader that as much as technology policy is enacted in Washington, D.C., it is lived throughout the country.
Rural broadband policy, like all public policy, is a living, breathing, and changing creature, which means that, with the right attention and coaxing, we can make it work for the people who need it most.
Also see Broadband Breakfast’s interview with Christopher Ali
Christopher Ali is Associate Professor at UVA’s Department of Media Studies and a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. He is the chair of the Communication Law and Policy Division of the International Communications Association and the author of two books on localism in media, “Media Localism: The Policies of Place” (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and “Local News in a Digital World.” This piece is excerpted by Ali from his latest work, “Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity,” which is available at the MIT Press.
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