A rural broadband strategy: connecting rural America to new opportunities
Today I presented Microsoft’s thoughts on the rural broadband gap in the United States at a lunch sponsored by the Media Institute in Washington, D.C. It is an important opportunity to address a problem that is receiving a great deal of attention, but not many solutions. While we don’t have all the answers, Microsoft has spent several years working on the issue and we published a white paper today with our best ideas for a new national rural broadband strategy. A summary of our white paper is here.
Today’s event took place at the Willard Hotel, in the same building where 800 of America’s most prominent leaders in science, business, art and government convened 101 years ago to honor Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the telephone and look to the future of long distance communications. That event, called “Voice Voyages,” was sponsored by The National Geographic Society and featured the unprecedented public demonstration of coast-to-coast telephone capability that would connect every community large and small across the nation.
A century later, a new generation of connectivity issues are arising at a critical time. Broadband connectivity is no longer simply a luxury for streaming YouTube videos on a tablet (as enjoyable as that may be). It has become a critical connection to a better education and living. New cloud services are making broadband a necessity to start and grow a small business and take advantage of advances in agriculture, telemedicine and education. In short, broadband has become a vital part of 21st century infrastructure.
Yet today 34 million Americans still lack broadband internet access, which is defined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a 25 Mbps connection. Of these, 23.4 million live in rural parts of our country. People who live in these rural communities increasingly are unable to take advantage of the economic and educational opportunities enjoyed by their urban neighbors.
The time is right for the nation to set a clear and ambitious but achievable goal – to eliminate the rural broadband gap within the next five years by July 4, 2022.
Read more about this strategy and the Microsoft Rural Airband Initiative on Microsoft on the Issues.
As a resident of a rural area and a student who relies on the internet for graduate coursework and research, I am glad to see this issue being addressed. Real-time conferencing with professors is simply not feasible with the connectivity I am stuck with currently over satellite with data caps. I look forward to timely developments in this area.
“Every valuable human must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are”
7 年Having been a part of the early days of Internet access with the ISP Mindspring (later EarthLink) I am amazed that 20 years later and living along the I-95 corridor between Richmond Virginia and Washington DC, that my community does not have broadband Internet! Years ago, COMCAST held a "town hall" of sorts by laying out their 3 stage plan to resolve this situation. My neighborhood was to be part of stage 3... They built out plans1 and 2 but then stopped, leaving those of us in stage 3 looking at the Fiber drops at the corner of our street to remind us of how close we came to becoming a part of the 20th (yes I know it is now the 21st) century... We are not a rural community by any stretch. We're just a forgotten area because many of the residents are senior citizens and I guess COMCAST doesn't feel they would profit by completing their initial plan. If that is the case, then it would help if our cities and counties enacted some form of legislation that would hold companies accountable for not following through with announced plans that leaves everyone hopeful only to have the rug pulled from under their feet without even the courtesy of an apology. This indicates to me that their plan all along was simply to build out the portions they felt would be profitable. Once that was in place, they bowed out of the rest having obtained their objective.
Sales Manager, Industry at Allstars Engineering Group
7 年Yes. Nice view.
Embedded Software Systems Architect . Domain expert in Embedded software systems. Thermal software systems domain expert. Embedded Software Manager
7 年Melissa Howard
Premier IT Support professional
7 年Has there been any sort of "real world" testing done to ensure that this would work? Also, are you suggesting that this would be bi-directional? If not, how would the uplink data happen?