Meet Bloomberg's own, David Nicholson.
Now his happy place is out in the field on the open road.
But like the rest of the world lately,
he's been working from home a lot more than he's used to.
COVID-19 has prompted a massive urban exodus,
as professionals of every ilk,
yearn for more space to live and work.
As a result, rural areas have exploded,
and they're poised to experience a resurgence
as more and more families pack up
and leave the big city to try out life in the burbs.
But there's one problem with that.
Not all internet speeds are created equal.
Anyone who might need to upload
or download large files for a living,
may not wanna pack up and move
to that cabin in the woods just yet.
Now David's house isn't a cabin, but it is in the woods,
and inexplicably, his internet is workable.
My internet is okay.
I pay a lot for it.
It's around $140 a month.
The download speed's great,
and the upload speed is terrible,
which is really bad for my work
'cause I have to upload these massive files.
But I'm definitely one of the more lucky ones
in this community.
Just a few miles down the road,
my buddy has awful internet.
It's usually under two down and under 0.2 up,
so it's often unusable.
Some days it's around one
and other times it'll drop down to about .2, .3.
I just wanna be able to have internet at my house
without having to go outside
the normal ways of acquiring internet,
it's really frustrating.
We're literally miles, a few miles away,
from downtown, and it just cuts off.
This is a problem and the solutions are not there yet
because getting high-speed internet in rural areas en masse
is something our providers may simply not be ready for.
If your internet service doesn't have
fast download and upload speeds,
then you don't have high-speed Harmony.
You have .
Americans on average pay about $70 a month
for internet at home,
but in rural areas it could cost a lot more
for a lot less service.
So the pricing for a fixed wireless provider here
can be something between 80 and $150
for about 25 megabits per second.
However, gigabit service,
which is a thousand megabits per second, and symmetrical,
is running at about 119 a month or 130 a month.
That's John Paul,
he co-owns Spiral Fiber,
an internet service provider here
in Nevada County, California.
And for the past 10 years, he's been trying to
bring an affordable fiber optic network to town.
It all started when he applied to be part
of the pilot program for Google's fiber service.
Across the country civic boosters have been
going to extremes chanting ,
singing ♪ Google in the morning
and marching trying to get the search engine giant
to look at their town.
The internet these days is crucial, to be in the world,
to be a part of the world
and to be connected to your community.
Google ultimately went with Kansas city, Missouri
which left Paul on a mission to get funding
to lay out fiber optic networks for gigabit service.
Over the next several years he would attend conferences
and pitch venture capitalists
and apply for grants to make his vision come to life.
One of the biggest roadblocks
to building infrastructure for the internet here
in the United States are the existing large providers.
They have their land staked out.
They would prefer that nobody come in
and compete against them.
In 2013, we applied for a grant.
We went down and met with the commissioners
at the California public utilities commission.
It was an arduous process to get funded
but we finally did against all odds.
We got a $16 million grant
and then we went out to seek venture capital.
Then in March of 2020, the pandemic hit the world.
Everybody got locked down and everybody came home
and everybody started using the internet.
And I remember seeing on one
of the local fixed wireless providers, websites
they've said, "Hey, we know you're all staying home
"but please don't use too much video
"and please don't use too much bandwidth."
And I thought "That doesn't work."
The U S connectivity gap is far greater compared
to countries that are considered its peers economically.
Some developing nations actually have better internet
than rural America.
Like in Kenya which has a state-of-the-art fiber optic
network fed in from their coastline.
The American connectivity gap does largely
affect rural areas that are either outside
of service coverage or simply prohibitively expensive.
This is Rebecca.
She and her family moved to Nevada County
just a couple miles down the road from David.
They took for granted that high speed internet
would just exist in the area.
And it's not something they even bothered to check
on before buying their house.
Turns out, all they got was dial up.
We wanted to move where we have a little more space,
room for the kids to run around, you know, just be out
in the mountains a little bit more.
Having come from a bigger city area where wifi is pretty
readily available, we hadn't really considered
that in our purchasing of the house,
whether that would be an option or not.
But when school started and now that we are remote learning
with our children and we're doing everything from home,
we didn't have the option to do that at our house.
So every day when school would start, we'd have to
pack the kids up and we'd go to my in-laws home.
They have a little cabin up in this area
that does have wifi already.
Rebecca's situation is the norm in rural America.
According to data from the federal communications
commission, just 4% of urban Americans lack access
to broadband internet.
That's compared to almost 40% of people who live
in rural areas.
But while that the case, there were also racial
and socioeconomic divides in terms of who had that access.
In addition to that geographic difference
low-income African-American students, Latino students
and first-generation college students were more likely
than others to have only one device at home that shared
among multiple siblings
and or lack access to that actual connection.
For most American towns there's also a lack
of competition, forcing internet prices up
and large providers like AT&T
and Comcast aren't incentivized to expand service
to these rural communities.
This is how Xfinity makes life simple, easy, awesome.
So in our area, we have a small imprint of Comcast.
But they're not gonna go out to the more rural areas.
It's just not cost-effective
for them to do it as a large company.
In order to lay fiber cable, you're actually physically
digging trenches into the ground.
And for internet service providers, they're primarily
focused on maximizing their profits.
And so the fewer customers you have, you know
in any square mile and the more fiber you have to lay
that's just kind of harder to pencil
out from a purely economic standpoint.
AT&T released a statement on the matter
expressing the need and desire for government assistance
to fund fiber optics expansion to areas deemed unprofitable.
Comcast released a similar statement
encouraging more public private collaboration
on this effort.
Federal agencies do offer grants to help communities
build broadband networks, but many have argued that there's
not enough flexibility on how to use these funds.
The COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress in March
and signed by president Donald Trump awarded $43.3 million
to 51 projects on the East coast alone.
But it also stipulated that these projects needed to be up
and running by December 30th.
For contractors who plan projects, months
and years in advance it's a scramble
to rearrange their schedules to meet that deadline.
So what we've been asking the federal government
to consider is at least as long
as the projects are getting started,
knowing the projects are being put into place
to expand both remote learning, working from home
and opportunities like that
that are truly driven from COVID.
We're moving as fast as we can regardless,
but hopefully they'll give us some more time.
Talking to John Paul it's clear that he believes
broadband is something that can transform a community
and should be considered a public good.
One of the first communities to come on
in the United States with full-on gigabit
service was Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Now they're a bigger city
but they're a city that was economically in a downturn.
In the last 15 years the city of Chattanooga has turned
around in an amazing way.
It's a nexus for young people to move to.
It's a place where technology happens.
It's not just about logging on to Zoom, you know,
to connect with your colleagues who might
be in New York City.
It's also your ability as a small business operating
in the town of Nevada City or wherever it may be
to quickly upload your payroll documents
or something onto the cloud, or to quickly, you know,
swipe a customer's credit card.
There's just some really basic business functions
and mechanics that I think people
in big cities really take for granted.
And that are just gonna be a much bigger challenge
for small business owners in rural areas.