Originally published March 3, 2016 at the Georgia State University News Hub, https://newsarchive.gsu.edu/2016/03/03/rural-america-lingering-digital-divide/.
By Jeremy Craig
At the turn of the 21st century, the town of LaGrange, Ga., about 70 miles southwest of Atlanta, embarked on a digital experiment.
Seeing its textile industry waning in the 1990s, LaGrange invested in building a fiber-optics network, hoping to lure new businesses to town with sophisticated infrastructure often found only in large cities. The network connected each of LaGrange’s 10,000 or so households, laying the groundwork for universal broadband access.
Then town leaders tried something bolder, offering high-speed Internet service to its businesses and citizens through a TV-Web interface—for free.
LaGrange wanted to help residents become more digitally literate, said J.J. Hsieh, associate professor of computer information systems in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. The idea was that if they used the Internet, they would develop keyboarding and other digital skills, and companies would be more likely to hire them.
“People did get hired, or at least got new digital skills, and that led to better jobs for some of them, but not all of them,” Hsieh said.
Just because someone has access doesn’t mean they’ll actually take advantage of it, he pointed out. Nearly 60 percent of households in LaGrange declined the offer of free broadband.
Some people rejected it out of hand because they believed the city government would use the set-top boxes, which provided Web access through a TV, to spy on them, he said. Others thought the project was a waste of taxpayer money and told researchers that people without computers should go to the library.
But some declined out of fear of the technology. Anyone trying to bring high-speed Internet access to a community must take into account that some people will still need to build confidence before using it, especially if they don’t have computer skills, Hsieh said.
By the end of 2002, two years into the LaGrange initiative’s implementation, neither the partnering cable company nor the Internet service provider (ISP), WorldGate, were seeing the profits they had expected. In fact, WorldGate was facing bankruptcy, and the city government couldn’t find an alternative ISP. With the network breaking down, the project was terminated in 2003.
The experiment had failed.
No magic bullet
With cities now competing for services like Google Fiber, which offers 1-gigabit-per-second speed, urban and suburban residents have connections that are much faster than what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defines as “high speed” (at least 25 Mbps, or megabits per second, for downloading data and 3 Mbps for uploading).
Even at those minimum speeds, downloading an average image or music file takes a second, and webpages appear in a flash. Streaming video quality—for teleconferencing with work, telemedicine to consult specialist physicians, or just Skyping with grandma—is usually quite good.
But 15 years after the LaGrange initiative, parts of rural America still don’t have adequate broadband access, blocking citizens from what many in urban and suburban areas take for granted: online banking, applying for jobs, downloading large files, streaming videos. According to the FCC, more than 53 percent of rural Americans lack adequate land-based high-speed Internet access.
Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, small-town leaders across the country have been trying to bring broadband to their communities by making it a public utility rather than a private enterprise.
“With some of these publicly provided services, they were filling a void, and the void was that the private sector just didn’t find it profitable enough to provide access,” said Bruce Seaman, associate professor of economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State.
In cases where private companies did provide access, they were (and still are) often the only game in town for broadband, leading to prohibitively high prices, he said.
“When the public sector filled that gap, the ultimate expectation was that it would make high-speed Internet access more broadly available,” Seaman said, “but there’s no ‘magic bullet’ about these things.”
Costly to expand
While broadband can bring tangible benefits to communities—spurring business development and helping residents develop new skills—it’s no panacea for solving economic woes.
Will the next U.S. president close the digital divide?
The Democrats’ policy platforms address the fundamental issue of Internet haves and have-nots in the U.S. But research suggests just hooking people up to broadband won’t solve the problem.
A 2010 study by the Public Policy Institute of California investigating the effects of the state’s efforts to expand broadband availability to rural areas found bringing high-speed Internet access improved employment, but didn’t change other factors.
“The employment effects were notable, but it really didn’t have much of an effect on earnings, or average pay, or median household income, or telecommuting,” Seaman said.
And while broadband can make an area attractive to business, other factors can play a larger role in where companies choose to move.
“It still has to do with the quality of the workforce, transportation infrastructure and educational access,” Seaman said.
Some benefits from broadband are difficult to quantify, he said. And then there’s the expense.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and therefore broadband is costly to both expand and to adopt,” he said.
More Americans relying on smartphones
Not everyone has a computer, even as prices have come down. But smartphones are becoming ubiquitous.
Nearly 68 percent of Americans report they own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. And more Americans are starting to rely on smartphones alone for Internet access, with home broadband adoption dipping from 70 percent in 2013 to 67 percent in 2015.
Smartphone-only Internet users tend to have lower incomes and come from racial or ethnic minority groups, Pew reports. And while some basic tasks such as email and chatting are just as easy on a small screen, those reliant on smartphones can face distinct challenges, such as data limits and service issues. Plus, it’s still difficult—sometimes impossible—to fill out job applications or write cover letters on most phones.
“Desktop access is when you’re doing a lot more data analysis, file sharing and other things you might consider to be white-collar workforce applications,” Seaman said. “It’s hard to do those things on smartphones.”
What broadband means for schools
The FCC’s minimum threshold for adequate Internet speeds for schools and other educational institutions is four times faster than the minimum for households.
High-speed Internet is important to education, said Steve Harmon, professor and chair of the Learning Technologies Division in the Georgia State College of Education and Human Development. But key to using bandwidth successfully is having access to the hardware—computers and other devices—that not all school systems can afford, he said, not to mention thinking through how the technology supports learning outcomes.
“The risk in learning technology in particular is that there always has been a pendulum swing,” Harmon said. “You get a new technology that everyone’s been excited about, and they think, ‘this technology is going to change everything.’ What they don’t realize is that the technology by itself doesn’t do anything.”
He pointed to a project by the Los Angeles Unified School District to purchase $1.3 billion worth of iPads, taking advantage of high-speed Internet access, but with no real strategy or design as to how they would be used in the classroom.
“That’s been something we’ve seen again and again,” Harmon said. “You have to have a balanced approach, and a design that takes into account the importance or the capability of the technology. You have to ask yourself the question, continuously, ‘What can I do with the technology that I can’t do without it?’””