Can 5G Help Fill the Rural Broadband Gap?

Thoughts about technology that is inclusive, trusted, and creates a more sustainable world

These posts represent my personal views on the future of the digital economy powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft.

Last week I wrote about efforts in the US and the EU to improve broadband Internet access in rural areas. It’s an acknowledged fact that even in wealthy countries, rural inhabitants continue to suffer not only from slower or, in some cases, non-existent Internet access but also from greater poverty and poorer health outcomes. It’s a matter of personal pride for me that Microsoft’s President Brad Smith (who also happens to run the department I work for) has long been a forceful public voice for improving rural Internet access.

The subject of this blog is technology policy rather than technology for its own sake, so in last week’s post, I didn’t go into detail about which technical solutions are best suited for rural broadband. But while writing that piece I discovered to my surprise that 5G networks, which I had believed were best suited for cities and suburbs, are also being actively considered in both the US and Europe for rural areas. 5G, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is a new international standard for cell networks that promises faster data, more connections per square kilometer, and shorter response times (low latency).

The concern about rural 5G has been that it mostly uses very high-frequency radio waves that carry a lot of data but don’t propagate very far and would thus be inefficient in sparsely populated areas. But in fact, most countries are also allocating some lower frequency spectrum for 5G which may be better suited for such areas.

The idea of using 5G in rural areas got a dramatic boost last December when the Federal Communications Commission (the primary US telecom regulator) proposed to funnel $9 billion in subsidies over the next 10 years to rural 5G networks. Then, a few weeks ago in April, the agency published a detailed 120-page plan to implement this idea, and the details are now being debated between the agency, the operators, and an array of groups interested in improving rural broadband access in the US. The $9 billion, to be financed by universal service fees added to the phone bills of American consumers, is roughly double what the FCC had previously intended to spend on subsidies for rural 4G, which it will now abandon. To the objection “why subsidize rural 5G when the US doesn’t even have sufficient rural 4G?”, FCC chairman Ajit Pai replied:

“This argument… doesn’t make any sense. We’re at the dawn of the 5G era. We shouldn’t spend our universal service funds to deliver networks using predecessor technologies because they’ll be outdated by the time they’re operational.”

While I was looking into this FCC proposal, I discovered that both the UK and Germany are already pursuing their own innovative programs for rural 5G. Both countries are encouraging their 5G operators to cooperate by building shared 5G infrastructure in rural areas where it would not be cost-effective to build competing networks. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Vodafone agreed late last year to jointly deploy 6,000 5G radio sites in rural areas in order to meet the rural coverage obligations imposed on them during the spectrum auctions, and Germany’s telecom regulator is ready to approve this cooperation. In the UK also late last year the four operators EE, O2 UK, 3 UK and Vodafone agreed to put up ￡530 million for rural 4G and 5G coverage in a “Shared Rural Network,” to be matched by ￡500 million from the government. Then in February Boris Johnson promised another ￡40 million in subsidies for rural 5G.

Germany and the UK are not alone in pursuing rural 5G. The CEO of Orange, France’s largest telecom operator, in February called for “extensive mutualization” among operators of 5G network infrastructures in rural France, noting that Orange had already entered into such arrangements in Spain, Poland, and Belgium. France’s telecom regulator, like those in many other countries, imposes rural coverage obligations on operators who participate in the country’s 5G spectrum auctions. French officials say they want to “avoid the mistake we made with 4G” in not mandating adequate rural coverage from the start.

One objection to rural 5G expressed by some regulators and operators is that it will reduce—or even eliminate—incentives to deploy fiber in the countryside. But everyone knows it is unlikely that we will ever see fiber strung to every isolated dwelling or hamlet in countries as large as France, Spain, or Poland, let alone one as vast as the United States. And this is probably a good thing for the environment too. In practice, some fiber will have to be deployed in any case to connect rural 5G base stations back to the network core. But using wireless solutions for “last mile” connections—whether based on 5G, TV white space spectrum (already being implemented in some rural areas in the US) or other technologies—makes a lot of sense.

A wildcard here is the idea being pursued by entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to launch thousands of satellites to provide Internet access directly from the sky. While it would be imprudent to dismiss these plans—some of the satellites are already being launched—they are more likely to complement rather than displace earth-bound mobile networks like 5G, which will offer higher bandwidth, greater density, and lower latency.

But again, the subject of this blog is technology policy, not technology alone. I want to close by emphasizing how much more important network connectivity will be in the post-pandemic era of national economic recovery we are now entering. Political leaders clearly recognize this. Just last week the EC’s influential Vice-President for Digital, Margrethe Vestager, urged EU member states to “limit as much as possible” the delays to 5G spectrum auctions that the pandemic has caused. Meanwhile, the EU’s Council of Ministers, in an unpublished working paper entitled Shaping Europe’s Digital Future, has called on the EC to develop an “Action Plan” to accelerate EU investment in 5G and even more advanced 6G networks (I confess until recently I didn’t even know there was such as thing as 6G—you learn something new every day).

In an era when work, health, and education will depend utterly on having a good Internet connection that stays up all the time, we cannot allow a portion of our populations to remain unconnected or “under-connected,” as so many rural residents still are. As Microsoft’s Brad Smith wrote back in 2017 when no one anticipated the extraordinary surge in remote working and learning that we are now experiencing,

“Broadband connectivity is no longer simply a luxury for streaming YouTube videos (as enjoyable as that may be). It has become a critical connection to a better education and living.”