In the debate over rural broadband, one word pops up over and over: utility. So that’s why Wherley and his neighbors are convinced that what they need is a nonprofit solution. Just because broadband isn’t profitable for commercial providers in Adams County doesn’t mean it’s not a necessity for its residents. The market just hasn’t generated the right incentives for internet providers to serve all potential customers in areas like Adams. But in fact, the problem is also acute in areas like Adams County, which has medium-sized cities like Gettysburg which are not very far from suburbs of cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Many people assume that America’s broadband problem is focused on far-flung areas, like remote stretches of Western deserts or the deep recesses of forests. But Comcast doesn’t offer broadband to all parts of Adams County, which residents blame on business logic arising from a marketplace that won’t generate adequate profits for a commercial provider to build out true broadband to all residents. The broadband access problem in Adams County grates on Wherley and his neighbors in part because Comcast, one of the nation’s largest broadband providers, is headquartered in Pennsylvania it’s just 120 miles from the cable giant’s corporate offices in Philadelphia to Community Media’s offices in Adams County. One sales representative from Comcast, the nonprofit’s provider, told him they couldn’t offer more than 10 Mbps upload, he recalled - 10 times slower than what some members of Congress say should be the federal standard.
Internet providers tend to advertise download speeds, but during the pandemic, upload became critical to anyone using videoconferencing or trying to transmit large documents or video. Wherley knows firsthand from his video work that his office at Community Media faces “bottlenecks” from not being able to upload fast enough. At a fall 2019 field hearing by the House Small Business Committee, local officials testified that Adams County’s median download speeds were just 5.9 megabits per second - well below the federal government’s bare minimum of 25 Mbps.
Microsoft shared data in December, gathered anonymously from its software business, positing that 61,000 people in Adams County - roughly 60 percent - don’t use the internet at proper broadband speeds. The federal data, which relies on information provided by telecom companies, suggests that only about 6 percent of Adams County’s 103,000 residents don’t have access to at-home broadband.īut few residents of Adams County believe those figures, and other estimates suggest a deeper shortfall. If you look at the county on the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband maps, it doesn’t look so bad the map suggests that the whole county has access to at least one home internet option. The nation, simply put, doesn’t even know where its internet black holes are found. But solving the problem isn’t just a matter of cutting a big check to fund the installation of fiber pipelines. Now, after years of federal subsidies that have improved but not solved the problem, the Biden administration is proposing to spend $100 billion over the next eight years to finally connect every American household to high-speed internet. “We realize how vulnerable we are in many different ways,” she said.įor decades, policymakers in Washington and state capitals have fretted about the patchwork of broadband access in the United States, which has held back economic development in underserved areas and became a major problem during the pandemic, when residents in these pockets suddenly couldn’t tap into what abruptly became the online default for much of the nation. Robin Fitzpatrick, president of the Adams Economic Alliance, described great frustration with the “black holes” of broadband inadequacy in the county that became obvious during the pandemic the school district bought 200 Wi-Fi hotspots for students whose homes lacked adequate wired options. There’s really only one option if you want internet, and if you’re upset with that, it’s take it or leave it.” “Mainly it’s lack of options that most of the residents are upset with. “The further out you get, the connection gets worse and worse,” Wherley said in an interview. Bandwidth constraints forced some residents to trade off between parents’ work Zoom meetings and children participating in remote schooling. As Wherley and his colleagues tried to set up Zoom-based meetings for local officials, he struggled with the area’s hodgepodge of spotty individual internet set-ups. Little changed over the next few years, and then came Covid, which transformed internet connectivity into a lifeline for workers, students and anyone who needed groceries.