Are Rural Communities Saying Forget It to Broadband?

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April 9th, 2008

Is David McClure, CEO and president of the United Sates Internet Industry Association (USIIA),
getting enough fiber in his diet? According to a post on the Web site, Broadband Reports, McClure says, "virtually every U.S. household and business has access to broadband, and even in many rural areas has a choice of broadband technologies -- fiber, wireless, cellular, cable DSL or satellite." Really?

What McClure is really arguing is that it's not broadband deployment that is the problem, but broadband adoption is lacking in these seemingly neglected communities, as he writes in this editorial in the DesMoines Register. [You can read more about McClure's view's in "Deployment of Broadband to Rural America" (PDF) from the USIIA.]

Is the issue really about the willingness of the public to adopt broadband? McClure's report shows that "broadband" is deployed in so-called rural areas. Sadly, McClure sticks to the FCC's and other antiquated definitions of broadband, which we have discussed previously here. I will give him props for admitting that the broadband definition is inadequate. But doesn't that admission debunk his whole argument?

What do you think? Are rural communities underserved in the broadband market? Or are those communities disinterested in services?


1 Comments

This is an old circular argument: "Rural areas don't need more bandwidth because they are not using any high bandwidth applications or services."

The problem is that you can't use high bandwidth services until you actually have a network to support them.

April 16th, 2008 // By Andrew Cohill

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