Rural broadband has been a discussion topic at the local, state, and federal levels for some time. Jeff Johnston, lead economist for digital infrastructure at CoBank, talks about the overall state of broadband in rural America.

“Well, we’ve made progress. If you look back to where we were before COVID and how COVID exposed how vulnerable those who are living in rural America who do not have access to the internet, you know how vulnerable they are. We’ve made a lot of progress since then, both with federal and state money and private capital as well. So, we’re moving in the right direction, but we’re not where we need to be quite yet. There is $42.5 billion that was earmarked out of the Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act, and specifically, it’s the BEAD program within that piece of legislation. That’s exciting because that’s an unprecedented amount of capital, an unprecedented amount of money that the government has set aside to support building out rural broadband networks to get those who are not connected, connected.”

The program hasn’t made as much progress as was first hoped, but he’s anticipating more progress to come in the months ahead. Johnston said rural electric cooperatives are doing a lot of work to close that digital divide.

“No doubt. Look, the rural electric cooperatives are sort of unsung heroes in a lot of regards in terms of the work that they’ve done building fiber to the home networks for their members who don’t have any connectivity, and they continue to do that, so kudos to them. They’re playing a critical role in bridging the digital divide in rural America, as are rural telephone cooperatives and privately owned and managed rural telecom operators as well, so it’s kind of a multipronged approach.”

He said future 6G wireless development will open up a lot of space for even more precision agriculture in rural America.

“Further on down the road, we have the 6 Gigahertz spectrum bands that have an enormous amount of capacity available to build wireless networks in rural America and facilitate the Precision Ag adoption among farmers and ranchers because, as we know, those drive significant operational efficiency. So, there are a lot of bats and balls that we have to play with here to get where we need to get to, which is exciting.”

One of the biggest challenges to improving connectivity is copper wiring in rural areas.

“The folks that are on copper lines right now are struggling because the applications that we use, whether it’s Zoom or streaming video from Netflix, I mean, these are pretty bandwidth-intensive applications, and you need a good connection to be able to take advantage of those. So yeah, those folks are in a tough spot right now. And so, yeah, getting back to the BEAD Program in the $42.5 billion that’s meant to help those folks, it’ll be interesting to see how we go from this point forward in terms of how that money is managed and doled out if you will.”