NOTE In response to the closing of schools and colleges due to the coronavirus crisis, Charter/Spectrum has announced that it is offering free Internet service for 60 days to any household with a student at home that currently does not have Internet service. Families can call 844-488-8395 to enroll. The Spectrum Internet Assist Program is also available for eligible low-income households. The cost is $14.99 per month for this program. Visit SpectrumInternetAssist.com or call 844-525-1574.

Dearth of Internet service a problem for many

Working, learning from home not possible

 By Demi Budd | Manor Ink

Sullivan Couty, NY – We began work on this article before the coronavirus epidemic hit our region with full force. Very suddenly, it brought home how the Internet is vital to our lives and access to it is a basic necessity – for critical information and news, healthcare, connection with friends and family, and now even for education. But for many people, especially those living in rural areas, good connections to the Internet are not available or may be too expensive.

Access to the Internet is typically provided by a cable company (Charter/Spectrum in most of Sullivan County), a cellular/wireless phone company (such as ATT or Verizon Wireless) or, in some areas, a local telephone company (such as Frontier). Broadband or high speed access is generally provided by cable companies, or telephone companies that have installed fiber lines in their service area, as these technologies provide the best and most reliable Internet service.

While broadband has been implemented throughout much of the United States, the deployment rates are drastically different in urban as opposed to rural areas. Urban deployment is greatly outpacing rural installations. In the Federal Communications Commission’s 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, this “digital divide” is shown quite clearly. The FCC states that, as of December 2017, access to broadband in urban areas was 98.3 percent, but was only 73.6 percent in rural areas. Thus, something we take for granted and rely on daily, especially during times like the present crisis, is not available to millions of people.

Gaps in access nationally

In Sullivan County, the most recent survey, done in 2014, showed that 8 percent of homes and businesses did not have access to broadband. But, as discussed later in this article, these surveys are generally agreed to be unreliable and greatly under-report the number of homes without access.

Studies of this sort also only report the supposed “availability” of broadband. Broadband adoption is different, as it refers to the number of households that actually subscribe and pay for the service. According to census data from the 2016 American Community Survey, 81.4 percent of American households have a broadband Internet subscription. This seems like a large percentage, but the remaining 18.6 percent amounts to roughly 60 million people without a broadband subscription.

Not surprisingly, data from the Pew Research Center states that those who do not have broadband subscriptions include the less-educated, those with lower incomes, seniors and households in rural areas.

So, what is being done about irregular broadband access, and how are elected officials and governments looking to close the digital gap?

Finding a solution

New York’s Sen. Jen Metzger and Rep. Antonio Delgado are both attempting to address the situation in their own respective ways. Sen. Metzger has recently introduced two bills. One would require the NYS Public Service Commission or PSC to study the availability, affordability and reliability of high speed Internet access services and to produce a detailed map to indicate the availability of service by location.

“Lack of access to high-speed Internet is a common complaint in my largely rural district,” said Metzger. “This legislation requires that the PSC examine Internet speeds, costs and other factors that together affect broadband access so that we can fully close the digital divide in New York State.”

Metzger’s second bill addresses the quality of broadband service provided. This bill would empower the PSC to establish quality of service standards, minimum performance levels and other requirements that would apply to every Internet service provider.

Lara Pritchard, Charter/Spectrum’s senior director of communications, said that though providing service to rural areas can cost tens of thousand of dollars, Spectrum is looking for opportunities to expand their network to serve additional homes and businesses.

“A variety of factors affect our expansion decisions, including the number of additional homes or businesses we can reach, geographic challenges and overall economic feasibility,” Pritchard said.

She noted that under Charter’s agreement with the PSC that permitted it to purchase Time Warner Cable, Charter was required to extend its network to an additional 145,000 homes and businesses in New York State by Sept. 30, 2021. That expansion is well underway, having reached 100,421 new sites as of Jan. 31. For competitive reasons, Pritchard declined to provide the number of homes Spectrum serves in Sullivan County or its expansion plans.

Rep. Delgado’s bills, the Broadband Speed Act and the Community Broadband Mapping Act, aim to reform the methods of measuring broadband access used by the FCC and Internet service providers. The latter bill is intended to help improve the FCC’s method for collecting data, which has been greatly criticized and is generally agreed to be wildly inaccurate, even after repeated efforts. This is because broadband access data was collected by dividing the country into census blocks. These “blocks” can be as large as hundreds of square miles in rural areas, yet if an Internet service provider serves only a small portion of that area – maybe even one household – the whole area might have been counted as having broadband available.

Collecting better data

Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC, has also called for a change in the collection of data as recently as June 2019. He claimed to want to “do away with the census block definition” and require broadband companies to provide data with a higher degree of accuracy. But some commentators have criticized the FCC for continuing to rely on information from providers themselves without a methodology for being able to verify the accuracy of the data it collects.

Delgado’s Community Broadband Mapping Act also would provide additional funding for the collection of broadband data in rural areas. It would also allow public interest organizations that are interested in challenging the FCC’s numbers to do so, and help pay for their input.

Both the Federal government and New York State have existing programs to support the expansion of broadband in rural areas. In New York, the New NY Broadband Program provides funding to Internet service providers to support the extension of service into unserved or under-served areas. This program provides up to 80 percent of the funds for construction under “reverse auction” procedures whereby private companies can “bid” to receive grants.

Also in January, the FCC announced the opening of its first round of Rural Digital Opportunity support allotments. These allotments, to support the extension of service in rural areas, are another effort to close the digital gap between rural and urban areas. Initially it appeared that New York would not be included in this round of allotments, due to the state’s own support program; however, after protests by Rep. Delgado and others, the final order included New York.

The digital divide is a serious problem that will likely exist for some time, but the coronavirus crisis may help to focus more needed attention on the broadband issue. At the same time, the coronavirus crisis is commanding attention and resources, so actions such as the Metzger and Delgado bills may take a backseat to dealing with the medical crisis for the foreseeable future.