Running a T-shirt printing business on the main street of Pinetops, a North Carolina town with a population of less than 1,500 people, Suzanne Craig depends on the Internet.
But getting reliable high-speed access isn’t always a simple matter for Craig and entrepreneurs like her. Some 39 percent of rural Americans lack access to broadband Internet, the Federal Communications Commission found in a 2016 report, compared with just 4 percent of urban residents.
The reasons are simple, yet challenging to address.
Rural communities tend to be less profitable for service providers, since a smaller number of customers spread over a larger geographical area prevents economies of scale that are achievable in a densely populated region. And years of lobbying by large Internet service providers have led to a web of state laws that block competitors and shelter incumbents.
According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a 42-year-old nonprofit that specializes in community-level needs such as Internet access, 19 states have laws designed to “prevent or discourage” cities and towns from developing broadband networks.
In many cases, large incumbent internet providers are shaping state policies to choke off competitors, said Christopher Mitchell, the group’s director of community broadband networks.
“Most state legislatures, on broadband issues, will only hear from incumbent providers,” he noted.
When entrenched providers in rural locations fend off new rivals, they don’t need to upgrade old infrastructure that can be slower and less reliable, said Debra Socia, the executive director of Next Century Cities, a group that works with local governments to improve and expand Web access.
“State legislators are writing rules that make it nearly impossible for local communities to build their own broadband,” she added. “That’s a model for ensuring extended profit off of an investment.”
Another challenge any new broadband provider faces is access to communications towers, which are usually owned by large telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T, local utility companies or both. Even if the owners allow access, they can block or slow a new network by delaying or complicating work on the poles.
Google, for instance, launched its super-fast Fiber program in 2010 and despite the company’s massive cash resources, it has struggled to access towers.
In some cases, the end result of such barriers is that communities are left with no way of connecting to the Internet, Mitchell said.
To remedy the problem, local governments can launch municipal broadband networks that offer services the same way that Comcast or AT&T might, sometimes leveraging public-private partnerships.
Such initiatives can prove contentious, however, placing business leaders and local lawmakers at odds with each other, as happened in North Carolina.
In 2011, the state’s General Assembly passed a bill that drastically limited the ability of local government to develop broadband networks. Its sponsors and cosponsors received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from AT&T, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink.
Four years later, Wilson, N.C., teamed with Chattanooga, Tenn., in asking the Federal Communication Commission to preempt state laws that restricted their networks from growing beyond city limits. The FCC agreed, allowing Wilson’s Greenlight Community Broadband Network to offer services in Pinetops, which at the time had only one provider: CenturyLink.
Craig, who recalls CenturyLink billing her for high-speed Internet access, said the service rarely lived up to its description. When she heard Wilson’s Greenlight service was moving into Pinetops, she immediately decided to switch.
Once Craig’s home was connected to the Wilson network, the difference in speed was so significant there were times she would work from her residence.
“You don’t really know how slow your internet is until you have really good Internet,” she said. Higher Internet speed improves efficiency, she said, “and efficiency, in our job, is money.”
Her satisfaction would be short-lived. Since Greenlight was a municipal provider, its service was conditioned on no other private providers entering the market. When Suddenlink, a St. Louis, Mo.-based company decided to move in, Greenlight had to leave.
Craig and other Greenlight customers in Pinetops must now switch to the new provider or return to CenturyLink.
CenturyLink, for its part, said it supports cooperation between municipalities and existing service providers and works with local leaders and policymakers to bring broadband service to more Americans.
“We are also open to working with other Internet providers,” a spokeswoman said.
