Tucked away on the edge of the Olympic Peninsula,
the Hoh Tribe is about as remote as you can get in the United States.
For many here, being connected meant, maybe a few bars of cell service.
Then, in the middle of a pandemic...high speed Internet arrived...from the sky.
The first thing Lisa Martinez did was update her phone.
Lisa Martinez: It's kind of irritating to see the red dot on your phone all the time.
It meant Ruben Hernandez’s daughter could start attending her online classes.
Ruben Hernandez: She was happy about it, maybe not as happy as I was. [Laughs]
It also meant…
Being able to connect with my grandma... Podcasts...
Education... Games...
Loan applications... Netflix....
Telehealth... Homework...
Snapchat... Talk with doctors...
Google Earth...that’s just something weird.... Dang...there's a long list.
With the world locked down, having the Internet…. Suddenly meant everything.
It’s kind of emotional. I'm sorry…. [Wipes eyes]...
helping the community is what we strive for.
About one hundred people live on the Hoh reservation, which is 14 miles from the
next nearest town. And like millions of other Americans, Internet companies have
little incentive to pay for the miles and miles of fiber optic data cables needed to serve them.
Melvinjohn Ashue: We're only twenty eight homes. But, that's a whole community
that is being left out just because the cost doesn't offset, you know?
When the pandemic hit, and being digitally connected became even more important,
the Hoh Tribe decided to try something new. They turned to space.
Announcer: And...lift off.
These are Starlink satellites being launched into orbit. They’re part of a project by SpaceX,
Elon Musk’s company that aims to eventually send people to Mars.
Starlink’s mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet from space.
No more miles of terrestrial cables.
No more telecom companies unwilling or unable to lay the literal groundwork.
Just a personal satellite dish and a wifi hub--all ready to connect to high-speed
Internet in about ten minutes setup time. Elon Musk: There are just two instructions,
and they can be done in either order: Point at sky, plug in. [Laughs]
Behind this is an enticing promise; Starlink will finally serve high speed
internet to the most remote, hardest to reach people across the country.
And even though the product is still being tested, they’ve found political backers in Washington,
D.C., where interest in expanding broadband is at an all time high.
Last year, the company was awarded about a billion taxpayer dollars.
It also got authorization in 2018 to launch 12,000 Starlink satellites into orbit.
Jessica Rosenworcel: We should be open to every technology that can help bring broadband fast,
and that is definitely one of them. But can high-speed Internet from space
really live up to its promise? How much of our taxpayer money should
we be betting on Starlink and their unproven technology?
And what happens when that money doesn’t end up helping the people who need it?
If you’re watching this video, you probably have broadband.
Broadband’s high-speed Internet. And it's defined as anything above 25 megabits per second download,
and 3 megabytes per second upload. That's enough to stream a 4k movie
or do a zoom conference call without lag... assuming no one else in your house is online.
According to a report by BroadbandNow, there are about 40 million people in
the U.S. that can’t get broadband. Access is particularly low on tribal lands.
When you factor in the people who have access but can’t afford it, that number
gets much bigger. Microsoft did a study in 2020 that showed as many as 120 million Americans
are not using broadband speeds. Michel Mersereau: Your ability to
access critical health care services, critical education services is so tied to the assumption
that people can get online. What Covid has done is… it's opened the curtains because broadband
is not diffused. And if you look at where it's most problematic, it is typically associated with
low income, racialized communities, indigenous communities.
The thing is, we saw this coming a long time ago, and actually had a plan to fix it.
This is the national broadband plan. It was released in 2010 by the FCC,
the agency that regulates America's internet. It’s was a big, ambitious plan, even by today’s
standards, and at the root of it was this idea that the Internet, like electricity,
has become essential to our lives, and everyone should have access to it.
Christopher Terry: By now, here in 2021, we should all have
basically universal access. it should have pretty incredible speed and
there should be multiple competitors available in every single market where it's available.
Christopher Terry: Of course, none of those things are true.
The plan fell short on almost all of its goals, and it quietly concluded in 2020 - just as we
were pivoting to pandemic life. So what went wrong?
Maybe an obvious thing to note, at this point, is that delivering broadband is expensive.
It means building towers, laying wires in the ground, through cities, up mountains.
John Horrigan: We had people on our team doing modeling on how much it would cost
to connect the entire nation with fiber? I forget the exact number. It was big.
John Horrigan worked on the National Broadband Plan at the FCC. He says
there wasn't a willingness in Washington to spend for broadband price tag for deploying universal
access turned a lot of people off in Washington at the time.
John Horrigan: It's not because the broadband plan didn't tell you it would be expensive,
it's because there simply wasn't the political will to do that.
So, without a willingness to spend, the creation of broadband networks was mostly left to the
private sector. And companies sought to maximize their return on investment.
Christopher Terry: We have broadband where there's an awful lot of people, i.e. customers.
But in places where there aren't many customers or if there's a lot of customers with a poor
economic base, there's no incentive for a company to build out a network there.
There are exceptions to this. Federal and state subsidies have allowed companies to
build in areas with smaller profit margins. There are also non-profits,
and municipally-run broadband networks that have stepped in where companies won’t.
But there are a lot more communities, like the Hoh Tribe,
which were left out of the picture completely. And that brings us back to Starlink.
Satellite internet isn’t new, it's just been expensive and slow up until now.
Satellites that beam the internet down are far away - around 22,000 miles typically.
This means the signal is delayed long enough to make things like zoom calls
and video games basically impossible. Starlink satellites are about 350 miles away.
The lag is gone at this point, and the signal they beam down is much faster,
making real time interaction possible. In order to test this in the real world,
Starlink initially enlisted about 10,000 people, including the Hoh Tribe,
for something they called the “better than nothing beta.”
The initial reviews from the beta test have been mixed. Some have noted that the signal
can be blocked easily - by a tree or telephone poll, but when it works,
it lives up to its promise: High speed internet from space.
However, the launch of Starlink hasn’t been without controversy.
Astronomers have complained that the thousands of Starlink’s satellites being
shot into the air are starting to congest the skies, making their job harder.
There’s also the cost. The dish is 500 dollars, and after that, it's 100 dollars a month.
The Hoh Tribe council agreed to a three year contract with Starlink, but didn’t
disclose the price. The council made it work for residents by covering the costs until 2023.
Starlink declined to be interviewed for this story. In June 2021, Musk said that each
consumer package costs them about $1,000 dollars to make, and they are working to reduce that.
One way they’re offsetting their costs is by turning to us, the taxpayers,
to help them expand, through something called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.
The Rural Fund was introduced by the FCC in early 2020. It will give out a total of more than $20
billion over the course of 10 years. The first round of funding,
about $9 billion dollars, was awarded in December 2020. That money was specifically
targeted at areas with no broadband. Starlink was one of the big winners. It
was awarded nearly $900 million dollars from this pot, and granted projects in 35 states.
But there was a problem.... S. Derek Turner: Starlink won, not not all
of their money, but a substantial amount of money to serve areas that are already well served.
Derek Turner works at Free Press,
a policy organization that advocates for open internet and freedom of the press.
Last year he did an investigation into the Rural Fund and started noticing suspicious
locations that Starlink won bids to serve. Like all of these not-so-rural blocks in Chicago,
and these in Washington DC. Or this highway median, with no homes on it.
There were industrial parks, parking lots... S. Derek Turner: Large international's airports
up and down the eastern seaboard...Newark Airport, parts of JFK or the Hartsfield
International Airport, the Miami airport. There’s this Target in New Jersey that Starlink
won a bid to serve… if you were to drive out there and see whether they’d benefit from it….
what you'd find is that they already have pretty good wifi.
It’s not just Starlink. More than a hundred telecom companies were awarded money in the
Rural Fund, and Turner says about a tenth of that is going to non-rural areas.
And that’s because the FCC was using this map to determine coverage in the U.S.,
and it’s completely out of touch with the actual conditions on the ground.
The data is provided by the Internet service companies themselves,
and there’s little oversight. It wrongly identifies spots where coverage is needed,
and shows areas that need Internet as covered.
A bi-partisan law was passed last year by congress that now forces the FCC to update their maps.
Representative Mike Doyle: We have talked about incomplete
or inaccurate broadband maps for as long as I've been on this committee,
and I'm glad that my colleagues were finally able to come together and address this important issue.
The problem is, the FCC didn’t wait for the new maps
before they awarded the $9 billion dollars.
Jessica Rosenworcel was at the FCC when the rural fund was awarded,
but was a vocal critic of it. Jessica Rosenworcel: If you had a magic wand,
you'd go back and you'd sequence this all differently and you'd start with really
good information and really good data. S. Derek Turner: It's concerning to anyone
who's a fan of good government, that that money not be wasted and sent to
companies that don't do the things that they say they want to do for rural America.
For the bids that are serving people who need broadband, there’s another problem.
The rural fund uses something called a reverse auction,
which awards money based on the lowest bid. Shirly Bloomfield: I look at reverse
auctions as a race to the bottom. Shirly Bloomfield represents a network
of about 850 small, local Internet providers. She says some of the bids were so low, she doubts the
companies can deliver on what they promised. Shirley Bloomfield: What kind of Internet is being
put in there? How robust is it? I really worry that a lot of them will simply throw up their
hands and say, I can't afford to run it. S. Derek Turner: Looking at some of the data,
especially if you think of very low bids as a warning flag, I think we could probably say
maybe ten, twenty, twenty five percent of the fund is questionable and it could be
even higher than that in six years once companies start to default.
Many of the telecoms that Bloomfield represents were underbid in the Rural Fund's auction.
She says these companies might charge more, but are closely connected to the places
they are serving and stick to proven methods, like laying fiber-optic wires as opposed to,
say, beaming it from space. Shirley Bloomfield:
You're literally gambling with taxpayer dollars to say that a technology is going to work or that
this company is going to be able to provide that kind of service they've committed to.
In July 2021, the FCC acknowledged that money from the fund was mismanaged...
...wasted on things like parking lots and populated urban areas — and are
taking steps to clean it up. They released a list of hundreds
of bids that were already in default, and sent letters to 197 companies, including Starlink,
asking for some of that money back. The FCC says they are reviewing
Starlink's response. Jessica Rosenworcel: I think it's
important we make an effort to make the changes that we are permitted to make under the law
so that the right funds go to the right people, right places. We don’t want to
be in the business of awarding out billions of dollars to companies that can’t deliver.
[Mixed voices] We’re at a moment in the U.S., where there's
renewed political will to fix America’s broadband problem. In the face of a pandemic, a number of
local, state and federal programs emerged to help build networks and make access more affordable.
The Senate recently voted to pass an infrastructure plan that includes $65
billion dollars to expand broadband. President Joseph R. Biden: It creates
jobs connecting every American with high-speed Internet....
Jessica Rosenworcel: There’s a willingness to spend for new infrastructure,
to spend for broadband services, to extend the reach of networks, to make it more affordable,
that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in Washington.
But what’s clear from Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is that money alone won’t solve the problem.
That money needs to go to the right places, and invest in proven methods of deployment.
And loopholes and lack of accountability can lead to waste and fraud.
Christopher Terry: We made really bad choices with Internet deployment. If we don't correct those
mistakes and learn from them we'll be having this conversation again down the road.
For the Hoh tribe, it was about fixing the problem right now.
So they took a chance on a promising new technology, not because of its potential,
but because there was nothing else left to do. Melvinjohn Ashue: For them, you know, one hundred
people and it's probably not very much to help, but for us, one hundred people is everybody.