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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 22 2018, @07:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the pretty-much-like-everywhere-else-without-broadband-internet dept.

Here's an article:

On Thursday mornings, locals from Sharon Township, Michigan, can drive to the 100-year-old town hall and meet with their local government. The supervisor, planning chair, and zoning administrator all gather at a long wooden table, where they share a box of doughnuts and wait for the heat to kick on. On these days, the township clerk dutifully saws open envelopes containing tax payments from residents and—if it's anything like the frigid February Thursday when I visited—has to take a break to thaw her fingers, numb from the frozen mail.

The digital divide is perhaps more starkly illustrated here, in Washtenaw County, than anywhere else in the US. Sharon Township is just 30 minutes outside of Ann Arbor, and a little over an hour from Detroit, in the next county over. Its 1,700-odd residents are spitting-distance from some of the most technologically advanced areas of the state, including the University of Michigan. Yet when it comes to internet access, Sharon Township may as well be in the mountains of West Virginia.

On a map showing Michigan's internet access at the county level, the square representing Washtenaw looks like one of the best-served regions in the state. Fewer than 10 percent of residents don't have access to broadband internet. But the fact that the city centers are so well-served only makes it more difficult for communities like Sharon Township to get access. Telecom companies aren't expanding their land-based networks to reach these relatively small markets, and money for rural broadband get earmarked for areas farther away.

"It looks like we're covered," said Kathy Spiegel, the Sharon Township Planning Commission Chair. "When Peter [Psarouthakis, the township supervisor] first started going to meetings at the state level, they said Washtenaw County had full coverage and he just kept laughing."

[...] "The issue is very much like rural electrification," said Spiegel, referring to the federal subsidization of electric infrastructure in the 1930s that ensured all Americans had power. "Areas will die if they don't get internet. It's become essential, and if we want to keep a community here, you've got to have something."

Before the Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936, many Americans were on the far side of a different technological divide. Though we take for granted the ubiquity of electricity now, for a long time many Americans were left behind by electric companies that didn't want to spend the money to power remote, rural, poor, and less-populated areas. Senator George Norris, who represented Nebraska from 1913 until 1943, later recalled in his autobiography that at the time rural Americans had become sharply "conscious of the great gap between their lives and the lives of those whom the accident of birth or choice placed in towns and cities."

It's difficult not to draw similarities between that "great gap" and the digital divide holding so much of America back today. Many solutions have been proposed, and successfully executed in specific areas, but a widespread, ambitious solution like the Rural Electrification Act is little more than a dream at this point.

Instead, as the internet continues to become more and more vital to daily life, the areas without access drift further away from the rest of the country.

"Our world is a little bit different than everybody else's," said Ruth Bland, the school technology coordinator in West Virginia. "We can't just sit in this county and let the rest of the world go by."


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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @02:27PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @02:27PM (#670347)

    yes people from Applachia, never loose faith that whatever crap you learned when you were stupid kids is true.
    The market never fails, we just need more coal, and if our life is shit, that's because we are the chosen faithful.

    Let's keep giving dollars to the great corporations that have made so much for our region. The market is always right and our local industry proves that. Its only THOSE OTHER lazy bastards that complain.

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  • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday April 22 2018, @08:54PM

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Sunday April 22 2018, @08:54PM (#670478) Homepage Journal

    Our Energy Grid is so important for our national security. But it's in danger, folks. From hurricanes -- so many hurricanes last year! And from Russian hackers -- I put "sanctions" on the Russians, I moved very strongly. But the biggest dangers to our Grid are solar & wind. They go on, they go off. On, off, on, off, on, off. Very bad for our Grid. Coal & nuclear stay on for a long time. They just go and go. But we've been losing our coal & nuclear, right & left. So many shutting down. It's a disaster for our Grid, folks. I want a SUBSIDY for our coal & nuclear. Secretary Perry went to our FERC. And he asked for the subsidy. For any place that can store 3 months of fuel. Which they can do with coal. They can do with nuclear. But our FERC guys told him "no," they all voted "no." Very sad. We need that subsidy!