Within Our Grasp - Connect Us All to Internet
/by Duste Dunn
It’s been said before, but it is no exaggeration that the recent Covid pandemic has widened existing inequalities, resulting in crises in education, mental health, and equity. It is a sobering but established fact that a child’s outcomes in life can be predicted by the zip code into which they are born.
One stark example is access to wifi – clearly a critical utility, essential to education and participation in society. Since March of 2020 too many students have been forced to venture into parking lots to access wifi to take part in school, deepening CT’s already dramatic economic divide. This is all preventable, as the ability to provide broadband to ALL families is well within our collective grasp.
“the ability to provide broadband to ALL families is well within our collective grasp”
It is refreshing to see lawmakers on both sides acknowledge the urgent need to close the digital divide, an issue that has been further highlighted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As most Americans were forced to function remotely, they were dependent upon internet access to stay connected, but those who lacked it fell behind, especially in the virtual classroom. In rural areas, there were too many library and fast-food parking lots flooded with cars containing teachers and students who had no reliable broadband access at home. While schools have reopened, the reality remains that millions of students still lack suitable internet access at home, which has fueled our nation’s troubling “homework gap.”
After months of negotiations, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act has been signed into law, marking the most significant investment in our nation’s infrastructure in almost 70 years. The law will allocate funds toward a wide array of essential initiatives, one of the most important being the $65 billion in federal funding that will be used to help low-income families afford broadband with a permanent benefit that goes to their internet bills as well as an effort to expand broadband infrastructure across the country.
The infrastructure bill’s much-needed investment in broadband expansion offers great promise in resolving this problem and evening the playing field for all students, but significant barriers still exist in terms of deployment, primarily due to outdated and inefficient utility pole access rules.
Utility poles act as the driving force for our country’s infrastructure. Similar to how a water company would need access to a region’s water pipes to bring running water to homes, internet providers will require access to utility poles to provide homes with broadband. Internet providers typically do not own the poles so for any broadband expansion to begin, the pole owners and those doing the expansion must come to an agreement that allows internet providers to access the poles and attach their technology.
While this process may seem straightforward, it often isn’t. Internet providers are willing to pay the necessary fees to owners to cover the cost of access, but the system lacks a consistent framework for how responsibilities are divvied or how disputes should be resolved. If disagreements arise, there’s no telling how long it will take for providers to get access and for broadband to be deployed.
The biggest losers in all of this are the communities that are unserved. A few months or years of delay to connect an unserved community can mean everything when every day without broadband is a day you fall further behind. In the digital age that we find ourselves in, countless Americans rely upon the internet for almost every facet of daily life. The gap in educational attainment between students that have internet and those that don’t is well documented, and for those that continue to be deprived of this necessity because of a broken pole system, that deprivation will almost certainly have a negative and profound impact on their development.
“ A few months or years of delay to connect an unserved community can mean everything when every day without broadband is a day you fall further behind.”
Legislative action can and should be taken to modernize the pole processes and expedite broadband deployment. Congress can remove bureaucratic barriers that cause delays and work to increase transparency through consistent timelines for permits and access to poles.
The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure law was a monumental step in the right direction for universal connectivity, but obsolete pole regulations threaten to squander that progress by delaying deployment and bleeding funding. We need faster, fairer standards for pole access so that unserved Americans can get online now. For the nearly 14 million Americans that live in areas with no access, there’s not a second to spare.
Duste Dunn is Development Director at the Connecticut Citizen Action Group. CCAG is a statewide membership-based organization dedicated to actively engaging the residents of Connecticut to alter the relations of power in order to build a more just society.
