Mountain states like Montana want to bring broadband infrastructure to minority and disadvantaged populations in areas that have been difficult to reach, largely due to topography. And in Appalachia, West Virginia is using its federal broadband funding to stand up infrastructure to serve needs like economic development and online education, both seen as central pieces of a broadband equity strategy.
“It’s definitely going to be important for citizens in these rural states to stay engaged with their state’s broadband and economical development offices and local governments, to make sure these programs are successfully getting people connected,” said Tim Tincher, a senior public relations strategist for Reviews.org, an evaluator of consumer technology and broadband plans.
A recent reportfrom Reviews.org looks at how much funding each state is receiving from the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, which is part of the larger 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Specifically, the report identifies how much funding each state is receiving per capita — which ranges from $20.97 per person in Massachusetts to a whopping $1,386.90 per person in Alaska, a large state with a small and often rural population.
“All of the states receiving the highest amounts of funding per resident — Alaska, West Virginia, Wyoming and Montana — happen to be more rural, high-cost-to-deploy states,” Tincher said.
Texas, a large state with a large population, is receiving the most funding. The Lone Star State will get more than $3.3 billion from the BEAD program, which comes to $113.66 per resident. By comparison, the second-largest allocation is California, which was awarded $1.86 billion, or $47.15 per person. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is often highlighted as a crowning bipartisan domestic policy achievement by the President Joe Biden administration. No Republican in the Texas congressional delegation voted for the IIJA.
A report earlier this year by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found funding allocation from the BEAD program is largely matching demand. When analyzing data from the coverage maps produced by the Federal Communications Commission; Ookla, which measures broadband speeds; and the American Community Survey, the report’s analysis concluded four states have the highest broadband infrastructure need: Montana, Mississippi, Alaska and Wyoming.
Montana was awarded just under $629 million from the BEAD program, or about $580 per person. Mississippi was awarded $1.2 billion, which translates to $406 per person. Alaska was awarded just more than $1 billion, or $1,387 per person. Wyoming received nearly $348 million, which comes out to $603 per person.
The lack of broadband infrastructure that helps create the digital divide is not an issue unique to either urban or rural populations, but affects both, said Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of the book Digitally Invisible.
In rural areas, a lack of broadband access “does have an impact on health disparities,” Turner Lee said Sept. 25 on Broadband Breakfast, a weekly podcast covering broadband issues.
“In communities where there are more cows than people, I ran into case workers and health practitioners where it takes two hours to get to a patient’s house, two hours to get back to the office to input the information ... that was before the pandemic,” said Turner Lee, recalling her research for the book. “After the pandemic, I found out that many of those people died, as a result of the lack of access to broadband, and how it impacts our ability to provision care.”
And in urban communities, where cost can often stand in the way of a monthly broadband subscription, it becomes vitally important for schools, libraries, community centers and other institutions to be connected — a point shared by rural areas as well, she said.
“I continued to hear these stories where we, in D.C., talk about these as ‘rural issues,’ or ‘urban issues.’ And we make them compete,” Turner Lee said. “These are not competing. Because the places and spaces where people are resigned, they have particular reasons of why they need to be connected that go way beyond some of the paternalistic reasons that we have.”
