Can major broadband investments fix Iowa’s rural internet?

Lack of high speed internet could hamper some rural areas’ ability to attract and retain residents

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Debra Faber’s only tether to the outside world from her home in rural Madison County is her cellphone, which delivers spotty service at best.

Faber does not have home internet service. She said satellite is the only option at her home, and it is too unreliable, making it not worth the high price.

Instead, Faber uses her cellphone as a hot spot when she needs to use her laptop, mainly to pay bills and shop online. But even her cell signal is weak, and with speeds of around three to five megabits per second, she can’t stream movies and TV or work from home.

“I'm not able to stream movies, I'm not able to use my computer at home,” she said. “If I had Google Fiber or something like that I could attach my phone to it. I get maybe one or two bars on my phone.”

When her office transitioned to remote work during the pandemic, Faber said she had to drive to the office because her lack of internet made it impossible to work from home. Faber doesn’t have school-age children, but she said if she did they would not have been able to attend school remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Living just six miles outside Winterset, Faber said she doesn’t understand why the city’s internet providers can’t build to her home.

“It's like a dead zone, and I'm six miles from Winterset, 10 miles from Van Meter,” she said. “I'm not out in the boonies.”

Faber’s house is one of more than 50,000 homes, businesses and other locations in Iowa that are considered “underserved” by federal broadband standards, meaning they have access to less than 100 megabits download and 20 megabits upload speeds. More than 8,000 of those are “unserved” meaning their speeds are less than 25 megabits download and 3 megabits up.

Those locations are mostly in rural areas, where the terrain and long distances between homes makes it expensive to build out reliable internet networks. Often, satellite internet — subject to the unpredictable dictates of weather — is the only option.

Federal money seeks to fix broadband

A recent deluge of federal cash, building on hundreds of millions that have already been dedicated, aims to fix that problem.

The White House announced last week Iowa would receive $415 million in funding toward internet infrastructure from a federal program in the bipartisan infrastructure law that President Joe Biden signed in 2021.

Earlier in June, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced she would dedicate $148 million in federal grants to broadband providers to build projects in underserved zones. The money came from a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act, and will be the eighth round of funding through the state’s Empower Rural Iowa Broadband Grant Program.

“Iowans deserve access to reliable, fast broadband,” Reynolds said when announcing the funding. “Reliable internet connections are needed to live, work, and raise a family. This investment in infrastructure gets us one step closer to providing easy internet access to all Iowans. ”

Those dedications will bring the total in state and federal money spent or announced to improve Iowa’s broadband access to around $950 million. Still, that funding may not be enough to fully close Iowa’s digital divide, said Curtis Dean, the co-founder of the Community Broadband Action Network.

“The challenge is that what is left — the premises that have nothing, that are underserved or unserved altogether — when you look at the nation, there's a reason why they are left,” he said. “It's because they are the most expensive to serve. We're now getting into the most expensive of the most expensive with these final rounds coming.”

Building wired broadband networks across large, sparsely populated areas is prohibitively expensive for most service providers, Dean said. Without government grants covering the vast majority of the project, providers won’t undertake the cost needed to build that infrastructure.

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Iowa’s most recent round of funding, which prioritizes more than 90 “broadband intervention zones” for the funding, will match up to 80 percent of the project cost, which may allow providers to reach some homes that have been elusive so far.

“It's in (the providers’) court,” Dean said. “They're going to have to be the ones that want to build these networks. And they're going to have to be the ones that apply for the funds, and they're going to have to be the ones that are comfortable with whatever financial risks they take on.”

The last seven rounds of funding from the Empower Rural Iowa Broadband Grant Program, which allotted more than $350 million to Iowa broadband projects, have made a significant dent in Iowa’s broadband access.

Gloria Van Rees, spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Information Officer, which administers the program, said more than 109,000 Iowa homes, businesses and schools will be connected once ongoing projects are complete.

“The additional BEAD funding announced today, combined with nearly $150 million in funds currently available, will further reduce broadband disparities and help to arrive at the goal of universal access in Iowa,” she said when the federal funding was announced last week.

Good access is a “necessity”

Slow and unreliable internet touches every aspect of life in rural areas, said community leaders and development officials in areas that received broadband intervention zone designations. It impairs work, education, business development, and makes it harder to recruit people to live and work in rural communities.

“What we learned from the whole COVID experience (is) that if people have good internet access, they can do a lot of things from their homes,” said Bryan Ziegler, a Wapello County supervisor who handled the county’s application for a broadband intervention zone. “Both business wise and personal use, like for medical reasons. And so it becomes kind of a necessity that everybody has good access.”

Without a connection to reliable internet services, businesses also are hesitant to set up shop in rural Iowa.

“In a couple of smaller businesses, it was an issue of, they almost had to relocate if they wanted to stay in business, because they didn't have that access,” Ziegler said.

Overall quality of life also relies on being connected to broadband, said Tom Leners, the executive director of the Madison County Development Group. Access to streaming entertainment, being able to video chat with family members, and more perks are important as businesses look to recruit young people to live in Madison County.

“The schools are there, the education systems are there, the groceries, all those things are there,” he said. “But then they start looking at some quality of life issues … they start looking at the connectivity.”

Dean and Leners said broadband access is often a top question people ask about when they are looking to buy a home in a rural area or small town. After COVID-19 shifted much of the workforce to remote work, many young people expect to be able to work from home, Dean said.

“So they're going to make choices on where they live based on what amenities are available, including broadband, good schools, good roads, parks, that sort of thing,” Dean said. “And broadband used to be kind of toward the bottom of that priority list, but it's coming up to the top.”