Briefing: Rural Broadband

• Network speeds are measured in megabits per second (Mbps), where mega means million. For comparison, a typical photograph taken by an iPhone at its original resolution (i.e. not shrunk for the web), is somewhere around 1-5 megabytes, which is 8-40 megabits. So, if you upload a 16-megabit photo via a 2Mbps internet connection, it should take about 8 seconds.
• Network services always offer one speed for downloading (i.e. moving data from the internet to your device) and a different, much slower speed for uploading (i.e. moving data from your device to the internet).
• The FCC measures various ISP account types in a market (e.g. the advertised 200Mbps $70/month Spectrum account currently available in Northfield). They measure the actual download and upload speeds as median speeds. Roughly, this means that they test the speed of an account from various locations and at various times of day and take the median Mbps value they obtain over those multiple tests.
• Then they weight the medians across all the common account types. Say, if 1/3 of the population has an account type that has median download speed of 150Mbps and 2/3 of the population gets 60Mbps, then the weighted median will be 1/3 x 150 + 2/3 x 60 = 90Mbps
• Also, the ISPs lie about their numbers

• As of a 2015 vote (when Democratic appointees held a 3-2 advantage over Republicans on the FCC), broadband is defined as an internet service that provides a minimum of 25Mbps for downloading and 3Mbps for uploading.
• At the time of the 2015 vote, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel (a Democratic appointee) favored raising the definition to 100Mbps (download) and 20Mbps (upload) to put pressure on the industry to catch up with the many countries that offer much higher speeds. Of course, cable companies among others fought even the 25Mbps/3Mbps definition change.
• In 2018, FCC chairman Ajit Pai (Trump appointee) pushed to reduce the definition back to 10Mbps/1Mbps. So far, that hasn't happened.
• In 2019, just based on scanning through a lot of offerings in District 20 and in Minneapolis, it appears to me that the bulk of the competition is in the 50-200Mbps range. So Commissioner Rosenworcel was probably right that we should be insisting on 100Mbps when we talk about universal access to the internet.

There are many types of broadband connection, but here are the ones that are most important for our discussion.

• Fiber. Fiber-optic service is fast (typically offers 1000Mbps or more) and reliable. It's also expensive to run to residences and businesses. There's some fiber in Minnesota, but not a lot, and mostly only in urban areas.
• Cable. Coaxial cable service is fast (can offer up to 1000Mbps, but is typically used right now for 50-500Mbps). It's also reliable and deployed any place that already has cable TV.
• DSL. Runs over phone lines (so, potentially available everywhere). Much slower than cable, and appears to be slower per dollar at the moment as well. I have seen theoretical DSL speeds up to almost 200Mbps, but I haven't seen any DSL for sale that goes higher than 100Mbps. More typically, the DSL plans are around 25-50Mbps.
• Fixed Wifi. This involves having a local wifi tower of some kind (similar to cell towers). Fixed wifi service requires line-of-sight (so, no trees or buildings between your antenna and the tower). Fog and rain can disrupt service. I've seen service plans in the 3-50Mbps range.
• Satellite. Potentially available pretty much everywhere, but weather is a big problem, as is time-lag as signals have to go up to the satellite and back down.

• 5G is a new mobile broadband technology. It's wireless and similar to cell phone service.
• 5G is a new mobile broadband technology. It's wireless and similar to cell phone service.
• High-frequency 5G good news: fast (can do 1000Mbps) and wireless
• High-frequency 5G bad news #1: it doesn't work beyond about 1000 feet, so you need a lot of cell sites to cover a neighborhood, much less a city or a county.
• High-frequency 5G bad news #2: it doesn't work through walls, trees, etc., so a house would need an antenna (probably on the roof) with line-of-sight to the nearest 5G cell site.
• Low/mid-frequency 5G good news: can go through walls, and can travel farther
• Low/mid-frequency 5G bad news: much lower bandwidth than high-frequency 5G. As a result, when people talk about 5G, they're never talking about low/mid frequencies. They're always talking about "millimeter scale" frequencies, which have the bad news listed above.
• In summary: best guess is that 5G will not be a solution for rural areas for the foreseeable future
• Here's a good discussion of the technology and economics of 5G in late 2019
• Here's a detailed technical 2017 argument for why 5G won't solve the rural broadband problem
• Another pretty good discussion of 5G limitations
• The killer apps for 5G are in wirelessly connecting large numbers of devices in a densely packed space. For example, having thousands of sensors on a large factory floor is currently impractical, since a current wireless network can't handle all that data from so many sources fast enough. It's both a problem of how much data, and that there's long-ish delay ("latency") for each device's connection. 5G definitely fixes those problems where you can get line-of-sight from sensors to base station. Here's an article about these sorts of applications.

Here's a rough scan of available service plans in a few representative District 20 zipcodes, based on information provided by BroadbandNow. They seem to have pretty up-to-date info.

For each service plan, I name the company, the service type, the download speed, the per-month price, and the percentage of the zipcode that the service covers. This information doesn't say which portion of the zipcode covered, but I think we can safely assume that in most cases, the uncovered portions of a zipcode will be the furthest-from-town rural areas.

Note that the prices are deceptive. For example, the Spectrum 400Mbps in Northfield is $70 per month only for the first year, and only for new customers. I called for my own house, and I can only get 200Mbps, not 400Mbps, for $70.

• All zipcodes: satellite internet

  Viasat	Satellite	12-100 Mbps	$50-150	100%
  HughesNet (w/ data caps)	Satellite	25 Mbps	$40-130	100%

• 55057 (Northfield—80% town)

  Spectrum	Cable	200-940 Mbps	$50-110	88%
  CenturyLink (w/ data caps)	DSL	10-20 Mbps	$45-50	89%
  Northfield WiFi	Fixed wifi	3-30 Mbps	$40-70	100%
  Nextera	Fixed wifi	2-3 Mbps	$60-125	98%

• 56069 (Montgomery—50% rural, 50% town)

  Mediacom (w/ data caps)	Cable	60-1000 Mbps	$40-80	80%
  Frontier	DSL	6-45 Mbps	$28-45	85%
  RLI	Fixed wifi	3-30 Mbps	$30-85	89%

• 56071 (New Prague—35% rural, 65% town)

  Xfinity (w/ data caps)	Cable	15-1000 Mbps	$20-90	71%
  Bevcomm	DSL	4-25 Mbps	$50-80	99%
  Bevcomm	Fiber	50-1000 Mbps	$50-110	84%

• 56052 (Kilkenny—mostly rural)

  [No Cable!]	Cable
  Frontier	DSL	6-45 Mbps	$28-45	76%
  CenturyLink (w/ data caps)	DSL	10-20 Mbps	$45-50	19%
  RLI	Fixed wifi	3-30 Mbps	$30-85	89%
  Northfield WiFi	Fixed wifi	3-30 Mbps	$40-70	21%

• 55408 (Uptown Minneapolis, for comparison)

  CenturyLink (w/ data caps)	Fiber	40-1000 Mbps	$55-85	53%
  USI	Fiber	300-1000 Mbps	$50-70	76%
  Xfinity (w/ data caps)	Cable	15-1000 Mbps	$20-90	100%
  CenturyLink (w/ data caps)	DSL	10-20 Mbps	$45-50	100%
  Nextera	Fixed wifi	2-3 Mbps	$60-125	100%
  USI	Fixed wifi	1-6 Mbps	$20-36	100%

• Walz's Executive Order continuing the Governor's Task Force on Broadband.
• The Task Force's website
• The Task Force's 2018 Annual Report
• The two-page graphic summary of the 2018 Annual Report.
• The 2019 report is due on December 31. I'll check on it when it comes out.

• A residence or business has "access" to broadband if it's possible to get 25Mbps/3Mbps (or better) service at that location.
• As far as I can tell, the definition of "access" does not include affordability.
• As of the Task Force's 2018 Annual Report, we were at 90.77% access statewide, but only 79.26% rural. That's not surprising, given the 100% coverage in the Twin Cities, Duluth, etc., and given the low ROI for running cable to low-density areas.
• That last 9.23% is going to be tough, and is supposed to be done by the end of 2020.
• The numbers in 2018 were 74% statewide and 59% rural for 100Mbps/20Mbps (the Task Force's 2026 target).

• Something something

• The FCC's Strategic Goal #1 in itsmission statement is:
  Closing the Digital Divide: Develop a regulatory environment to encourage the private sector to build, maintain, and upgrade next-generation networks so that the benefits of advanced communications services are available to all Americans. Where the business case for infrastructure investment doesn’t exist, employ effective and efficient means to facilitate deployment and access to affordable broadband in all areas of the country.
• Strategic Goal #2:
  Promoting Innovation: Foster a competitive, dynamic, and innovative market for communications services through policies that promote the introduction of new technologies and services....
• Strategic Goal #3:
  Protecting Consumers & Public Safety: Develop policies that promote the public interest by providing consumers with freedom from unwanted and intrusive communications, improving the quality of communications services available to those with disabilities, and protecting public safety.

• The FCC seems to be pursuing rural broadband via Rural Broadband Auctions. I haven't yet figured out how the auctions work, but they're handing out billions to cause broadband construction.
• The Connect America Fund is also relevant.

• The FCC requires ISPs to use Form 477 to report their broadband coverage. But note this important caveat from this excellent article about coverage reporting:

  The Form 477 data-collection program that requires ISPs to report census-block coverage lets an ISP count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block.

  So the ISPs are legally allowed/encouraged to way over-report their coverage.
• Here's the kind of thing the ISPs do to manipulate the system.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai is typical of Trump agency heads in his support of eliminating regulations intended to protect consumers and the public interest. He generally defends deregulation by predicting that the deregulation will cause future investments by communications companies, but these investments are usually speculative fiction. Interestingly, Pai doesn't favor all large communications companies; rather, he has a particular interest in the financial welfare of the big ISPs (Verizon, Charter, Comcast, CenturyLink, AT&T) and news conglomerates.

• Pai pushes to regulate Google, Facebook, Twitter to the benefit of ISPs
• This FCC has loosened rules on media ownership in a single market.
• Did lower investments follow from enactment of net neutrality regulations? Probably not. (This article is from before the net neutrality repeal, despite the "Updated" date on it.)
• Did investments by telecom companies increase when net neutrality was repealed? Probably not. And this. And this. And this. And more recently, this.
• Summary of FCC actions in Trump's first year
• In early 2020, the FCC gave ISPs a new, lower-data-cap tier for getting funds for rolling out rural broadband. This is a change pushed by AT&T, Frontier, Windstream, etc. Here's the new order.

• Schools communicate with parents mostly online
• Information provided by government at all levels is mostly online
• Providing feedback to government is done mostly online
• Nobody prints phone books anymore—gotta be online for that kind of information
• It's very hard to apply for most kinds of jobs without internet access
• ...etc...
• It's an equity issue. Full participation in modern American society requires internet access.

• The Governor's Task Force has had steady support under Dayton and Walz, with a $20 million grant program.
• Good goals, not bad progress, but...
• ...reaching the last 10% of the Broadband Task Force's 2020 target is likely to be very expensive.
• ISPs don't wanna run cable to your farm 10 miles outside Bronson Lake
• Is $20 million per year enough? I have no idea. I also don't know what the funding for 2020 is.

• The US should probably be in the top five average internet speed in the world, but we've been languishing in the 10-20 ranks for a long time.
• Some of the problem is because it's just expensive to run cable to everybody's house.
• Some of the problem is a lack of incentive to reach everybody, because the big telcos and ISPs have established local monopolies nationwide so they aren't being pushed by competition.
• More thoughts on the subject

• The FCC's first Strategic Goal in its mission statement is:
  Closing the Digital Divide (see Section 5.1).
• Yet their principal behavior since 2017 is to deregulate the ISPs based on the theory that reduced regulation will spur increased investment.
• The increased investment by ISPs hasn't happened. (The only article I can find that argues that the investment has happened was written by a guy from the American Consumer Institute, which is a lobbying organization at least partially funded by the cell phone industry.)
• Update: The increased investment still hasn't happened as of January 2020.
• Chairman Ajit Pai lies and distorts the facts, generally to the financial benefit of the big ISPs.

This is my first draft, and not quite short enough for a quick conversation. But roughly, I'd make this argument.

• Affordable broadband has become essential for participation in modern life.
• Therefore, it's an issue of equity and fairness to get modern-standard broadband to eveybody.
• It's really expensive per person to run cables to low-density areas, so it's not surprising that unregulated, the ISPs would not choose to do so.
• That makes broadband access a natural place for government to step in, to ensure fairness.
• The Governor's Task Force is a good mechanism, but may need more help to push the infrastructure over the finish line.
• Also, they need to focus on affordability, not just running the wires.
• (Sidebar: It would be great to have some help from the FCC to get actual competition so the market can do its magic. But the current FCC seems dedicated to reinforcing local monopolies to prevent the local markets from working to improve service and price.)