America Needs a Rural Broadband Policy Soon

There are going to be a lot of things on the plate of whomever is elected president in November: Iraq, Afghanistan, energy, terrorism, climate change, national economic revitalization … the list could just go on forever.

But we’re not going to let that stop us from adding one more thing for either President McCain or President Obama to tackle next January: a national broadband policy.

Wiring all of America for access to the Internet at true broadband speeds, we would argue, is as important now as bringing electricity to rural America was for President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

When FDR became president in 1933 in the grip of the Great Depression, great swaths of the nation were still stuck in the 19th century from a technological perspective. While the nation’s cities had electricity, America’s rural heartland, for the most part, didn’t. Much of rural America was poor; some areas such as Appalachia and the Tennessee River Valley were mired in bone-grinding poverty.

The electric power companies had wired the nation’s cities and urban areas, where the work could be done quickly and inexpensively. But when it came to bring electricity to the heartland, their refrain was a familiar one: It’s too expensive … the capital investment is too high and the possible return is too low … it will cost us too much money, money we have but don’t want to give up.

FDR’s advisers realized that, at that thinking, the vast majority of America would take decades to modernize, with potentially catastrophic social consequences. They knew that affordable electricity had to come to rural America, so on May 11, 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was born with the sole mission of electrifying the whole of rural America.

The rest, as the tired cliché goes, is history.

Today, affordable broadband Internet access is as crucial to 21st century economic development as affordable electricity was in the 1930s. Unbelievably, the federal government — the level at which policy of such scope is formulated — has no vision or plan for making true broadband Internet accessible across the country.

That has to change.

According to a study done by the Communications Workers of America’s Speedmatters.org project, America ranks far behind nations such as Japan, South Korea and France for the average speed at which the Internet is accessed. According to the report, the average download speed in the United States in 2008 is 2.34 megabits per second, up from 1.97 last year.

And where did our competitors rank? Japan has a median download rate of 63.6 mbps, South Korea, 49.5 mbps and France, 17 mpbs.

Even more troubling was the statistic that dial-up — yes, dial-up, folks — is how 15 percent of Americans still get online, either by choice because broadband is too expensive or because it’s their only option.

Affordable broadband access would bring a multitude of benefits to rural America: renewed economic vigor, enhanced educational opportunities through distance learning programs, social networking, commerce … it’s endless.

Global commerce is moving online at breakneck speeds. In the not-too-distant future, a company will hire employees and not expect them to live where the job is; telecommuting is on the radar screens of national policymakers and corporate chieftans, but only where affordable broadband is available.

There are a myriad of means by which the federal government could bring a vision of national access to affordable broadband to reality: public/private partnerships, tax incentives for Internet providers to invest in the needed infrastructure in rural areas, public investment in new technologies.

America needs broadband access at speeds comparable to the rest of the developed world. It needs to be affordable, and it needs to be universal.

It’s as much a matter of national security as energy policy or winning the war on terrorism.