We don’t have to settle for some kind of poor substitute, something that’s just merely cost effective and leaves rural areas with substantially worst access than one would find in urban areas. You can look at the numbers in terms of how much it cost when you it well. You can look at the long term costs. Frankly, it makes sense to connect rural communities with high quality access. I just say that’s where I’m coming from on this.

There’s a couple of key points I always want to make. One is we have this historic commitment. The second is this is not charity. I can’t stress this enough, that this is something that we all benefit from. Making sure that people like Hannah grow up being able to be productive, being able to get a great education, being able to push the limits of their individual talents, that’s something that benefits all of us and it’s not something that urban areas should think smugly, “Oh, we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts.” Urban areas benefit when everyone has high quality infrastructure access.

Frankly, they do not have to make the choice over when we get the policy right. The question is ultimately, how should we do it? What is the best approach from a perspective of quality and from a perspective of cost effectiveness, to make sure that everyone has high quality service? As I argue and as Hannah’s research has shown, we can do this. I think we can ultimately connect everyone who’s on the electric grid to high quality broadband service as well using some of these time tested methods which are in rural areas public ownership and cooperatives. I wouldn’t say that they’re equal answers. In areas that have cooperatives, that’s probably the best approach.

In areas that don’t have cooperatives, it may be smart to first see if you can create a new cooperative or get an existing cooperative to expand near you. But there’s also areas where you might have an enthusiastic local government, whether that’s a city county township where you can get the kind of competence you need to build a municipal network. In many cases municipal networks are working on these issues as well, but I think when we look at the vast amounts of territory involved, coops are probably the best solution. I think Hannah can tell us more about many coops that have done this, but one in particular that is showing what can be done.

They’re giving out billions of dollars and they’re spending it on some of the worst products. You look at what AT&T is doing, AT&T is going to be getting $2.5 billion from the federal government to expand rural access. The speeds they are going do deliver, obsolete. The prices are $60 to $70 per month for this very slow service that has data caps. It’s awful. The amount that they’re getting per household is actually about $2,400, which would cover the cost of fiber in a lot of Indiana for rural areas per house, in Vermont we’re seeing this as well with the big telephone company there, Fairpoint, where they’re getting so much money that it’s almost the cost of building fiber, but because they’re focused on shareholder returns, they’re not putting it into fiber, they’re putting it into DSL and they’re going to look for future handouts to get higher quality service. There’s no doubt.

When you look at this you might be thinking, “Hannah’s saying that that’s really costly,” but actually it’s well within the realm of what we’re already subsidizing firms to build for obsolete technology. If we actually directed this to local institutions that wanted to invest in the communities, we would basically be there. There might be a need for some of those farther away farms to get a one time grant, but the cost of the ongoing service is actually low enough that these electric utilities will not need operating subsidies. They may need one time capital subsidies, and that’s totally affordable and totally doable, if we would just stop writing checks to AT&T and Century Link and Frontier and these other companies that have totally failed rural America.

After I spoke, one of the people came up to me and said, “Did you know that actually one of those areas that has fiber to the home is one of the poorest counties in the entire country, not just Kentucky?” They’ve been able to create jobs because of this, which I think makes the point first of all that this can be done when you have the right incentives and the right investments. But if you look at other areas of Kentucky, where we had local success stories, many of them are building wireless solutions. That’s because they’re making very rational decisions, which is to say the cost of building fiber is very expensive in the first few years.

It’s a very high capital cost and so lower income counties, counties that have bleak job prospects and people are unfortunately feeling that they have to move out of in order to get jobs, those counties don’t have the money to go and build fiber to the home. Now in talking to them, many of them realized that over 30 years the cost of operating and building wireless networks actually exceeds the cost of fiber optic networks. It’s just that fiber networks, they’re all front loaded and so what we have is a financing challenge that local communities themselves will really struggle to meet without innovative financing options like we saw in RS Fiber actually.

To a limited extent some local communities may be able to get around that but we absolutely need the federal government to help out in these areas. For that, we need rural folks to be educating themselves and demanding their representatives and their senators actually pursue what’s best for the county, rather that just what they hear is working inside the beltway of DC. The problem is, is that you need a federal government solution and that federal government solution is going to come from an area in which the only voices people listen to are AT&T and Century Link and Verizon and the big cable companies. We need to break through that kind of lobbyist power in DC in order to make sure that we have the right programs to finance these local solutions.

But many communities also recognize the benefits of a strong region, and so you see communities like Chattanooga fighting got the right to expand to their neighbors when the state will not allow them to. Tennessee has literally chosen rather than allowing cities like Morristown, Jackson, Tullahoma, Pulaski, Chattanooga to expand at no cost to tax payers. Tennessee is taking $45 million of state tax payer money and trying to give it to companies like AT&T, because AT&T is so powerful in the state.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see that municipalities that have been incredibly successful, I think Chattanooga made $20 in net income last year, they’re not able to use that to better their surrounding communities because the state has decided instead it wants to use tax payer dollars to throw at a company like AT&T, that is literally delivering a service that is 1,000 times slower at a greater cost to the rural areas. Now Hannah’s also tracked a number of barriers to rural electric coops, which actually violate federal law but state still have them in place.

Then, there are cases like in Indiana, where the state realized that they needed to explain some issues with [pole 00:19:47] attachments and they passed an act called the fiber act, specifically to encourage to coops to use their existing infrastructure. They had to actually allow the coops to use all their easements that they previously had. North Carolina is the state that had prevented electric coops from providing internet service.

There have a been a number of little ways around it, such as partnering with other telephone coops or local telephone companies or not directly offering internet service to the public but having dark fiber. I know one had to create a subsidiary called, I think it was [Columbia 00:20:26] River Electric coop had to create a subsidiary called Blue Wave Connections. The rules around coops are complicated and they vary so much state to state.

The only people they can get information from are lobbyists because there is not a local group that is going to inform an elected official in North Carolina or Tennessee about the public interest view on telecom. Telecom is kind of this forgotten thing. If you’re working in energy, there’s lots of environmental groups that are working it. They’re still totally outnumbered but in telecom there’s practically no one. State legislatures are really at the mercy of these big cable and telephone company lobbyists.

That’s to some extend why even though we oppose additional barriers and we try to work with state legislatures where we can, one of the things that’s so exciting about cooperatives is that largely they can make investments that work. They may have to jump through some hoops as Hannah was describing, but people who are listening who are served by an electric or a telephone coop and they’re unhappy with their broadband service should contact their coop board. They should talk to their neighbors and organize local businesses to demand that the coop do something about it.

This is something that we have a ton of resource on at muninetworks.org, the website that houses most of our broadband work. A lot of it is work that Hannah’s done. There’s a number of interviews also that I’ve done with electric coops about this. We’ve created a wealth of resources for people who want to learn more about how they can push their own coops to solve this problem for them.

If you are doing that with your broadband service as well, then not only are you keeping that money in the community, often you’re going to have much better broadband service. Which mean you’re going to have better job prospects, you’re going to have higher property values, you’re going to be a place that people want to come to, which is going to make your community more valuable.

It’s going to make it easier to have this positive cycle of investment in the community and creating a virtuous circle. It’s hard to have a thriving economy today without a high quality broadband option. It will be even harder tomorrow. Without those high quality jobs and that sort of investment, it’s harder to be a place that people want to live. This all basically comes together and helps you to be more self-reliant.

But I would say that a recommendation that I can recommend from both Hannah and I, because we both read this and we both found it amazing because it was on topic and I think far more interesting than I expected, is a book called Electricity For Rural American, The Fight For the REA, which is the Rural Electrification Administration. It’s by Clayton Brown. It’s a book that’s almost 40 years old I think. I got it because I wanted to know the history.

I literally was thinking to myself, “Alright, this is going to put me to sleep for a few weeks but I’m going to get through it. I opened it up and I got sucked in. It was almost like a mystery. I found it to be incredibly exciting the way the … It was almost like this suspense thriller of how the REA came to pass, the people behind it, the interest, the talking points from the big companies at the time, which were trying to oppose these coops. I have to say, if you can find it I highly recommend it.

Short stories, as I’m kind of learning because I haven’t really gotten into them too much before, is that you can just read a little bit. You read the story, it’s like 30, 40, 50 pages, and then you can completely get out of that world. You’re not sucked in. You don’t have to spend hours and hours reading the same book. It’s great. Thank you so much Chris and Hannah for joining me today, it was a great discussion.