Joining the ranks of the Underserved

In early November, after more than a year in the making, the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force released its report to both the Legislature and the Governor. And as the Task Force member appointed by Governor Pawlenty to represent rural citizens throughout the state, I was particularly pleased with both the focus and priority the Task Force placed on meeting the broadband needs of rural Minnesotans who find themselves in areas of the state that are both unserved or underserved by incumbent broadband providers.

But the real irony that unfolded shortly afterwards makes these issues quite real and personal for me. For you see, after spending a decade as a high-speed broadband user and a telecommunications researcher, I moved out to a beautiful farmstead in early December just a few miles from the campus where I work. But the consequence is now that I am 2 miles down the gravel road; I am just out of the reach of both the incumbent telephone and cable companies that provide the majority of the broadband services in the region.

Now don’t begin to feel too sorry for me as I still have my mobile broadband card, so I’m not completely offline. But both the connection speed (well under 1Mbps) and the reliability are far from ideal. So now that I have personally joined the ranks of the broadband underserved, I am counting on the Minnesota Legislature to carefully read and begin to implement the Task Force’s recommendations. And with that in mind, allow me to share with you the elements of the broadband report that give me hope.

A Focus on Ubiquity – One of the areas that the diverse Task Force members found complete unity and consensus on was that high-speed broadband service must reach every home and business across Minnesota. Not just the homes in town; but every home everywhere in Minnesota. It’s a very clear, unambiguous and positive statement for rural Minnesotans all across the state.

Setting a Minimum Connection Speed – For the residents of the last farmstead at the end of the gravel road, few concepts are more important than defining a minimum connection speed. That’s because you can bet that that’s the speed they will likely receive. Accordingly, it’s important to set a minimum speed that is sufficient for those remote residents to access telehealth services, engage in distance education services and functionally access many of the essential services that broadband allows us to access. For you see, people who live in remote places and have poor access to broadband services typically have poor access to a variety of other services as well. It’s simply the disadvantage of distance. But broadband is a unique technology that often allows us to transcend the disadvantages of distance, by bringing services right into our homes.

So ensuring a minimum connection speed is vital; and for the Task Force, that minimum speed was 10-20 megabits per second. But equally important, the Task Force set an adjacent goal for Minnesota to be in the top 5 states in both connection speed and broadband penetration. So in fact, that minimum connection speed is really a moving target that must regularly be increased if Minnesota hopes to achieve and then maintain a “top 5” ranking.

Prioritizing the Unserved First – A final element of the report that is equally important to rural Minnesota is the focus on prioritizing public investments in broadband deployment. The truth is that there simply isn’t enough money, public or private to “fiber up” the state as many would like. In fact, the costs are somewhere between enormous and staggering! So the development of public/private partnerships will be required to effectively finance these projects. But where to begin? Where the need is highest? Where the return on investment will be highest?

Well, in this case the Task Force was once again clear and unambiguous when they noted that we should first address the needs of the residents living in unserved areas of Minnesota, where broadband currently has no reach; next address the needs of the underserved areas; and finally address the remaining needs of the state. With this priority in mind, the Task Force is clearly placing rural Minnesotans at the front of the line.

So when the Minnesota Legislature once again convenes in February, there will be many who will help breathe life into this new report and help encourage the Legislature to implement many of these recommendations. And rest assured that I will be one of them because this time it’s personal!

The Problem with Universalism

The Minnesota Hi-Speed Broadband Task Force has now spent the past few months listening to a variety of public officials and others who have provided comment and testimony regarding broadband deployment throughout the state. And through this process it’s become clear that for a growing number of Minnesotans, ubiquitous access and universal adoption of broadband is a significant goal. But when you really think about it, this notion of universalism increasingly permeates much of our public policy today. Within the current public debate about health care reform, universal coverage is a goal that both Democrats and Republicans publicly seem to embrace; and in our national discussion about public education we want to ensure that absolutely no child is left behind.

It’s interesting that in a capitalist culture that focuses on competition, product differentiation and market share that we seem to be romancing the values of universalism. For example, for many years economists defined the term “full employment” to actually mean an unemployment rate of 5 percent or less. I simply don’t ever recall back in the 1990s seeing public officials at the state or federal level wringing their hands over the 3-5 percent of the work force that were jobless. And public schools with a 90 percent graduation rate used to be a source of pride and held up nationally as an example of what is right with our public school system. Sure, we aspire to100 percent graduation rates, but there just seemed to be an understanding that while no one wants to leave a child behind, that reality often trumps aspiration.

Returning universal adoption, I am reminded that virtually all former innovative technologies still have yet to reach the goal of universal adoption. This is true for even some of our most mundane technologies. For example, we have yet to achieve universal adoption of a telephone in every home, a microwave in every kitchen, or a car in every garage. For the simple reality is that there are a variety of factor that help explain why people choose to adopt some technologies and take a pass on others. Age, income, culture, tradition, religion, education and awareness all come into play.

The late Everett Rogers wrote the seminal book on the adoption and diffusion of innovative technologies. Rogers was an Iowa farm boy who earned his doctorate in the 1950’s trying to understand why some farmers adopted some obviously beneficial technologies while others did not. A decade earlier when agriculture was transitioning from planting varietal seed corn to hybrid seed corn researchers understood that both the yield and the drought-resistant characteristics of the hybrid seed made it far superior. Yet it took many years for farmers to adopt this new technology. From these and other studies, Rogers argued that the adoption of any new technology actually occurs in a series of predictable stages which culminates in an “S-shaped” curve, where the adoption of a new innovation starts out very slowly until it reaches a critical mass; at which point the adoption rate soars, only to tail off and stabilize. Most importantly however, was that Rogers never suggested that any technology will achieve a 100 percent adoption rate. In other words, regardless of the benefits of the innovation there will always be some non-adopters. A good example is the recognition that even today; some parents choose not to immunize their children against a variety of serious and contagious diseases.

So how do we rationally address this increasing attention to universalism in policy when all the evidence suggests that such universalism is unreasonable and unattainable? Well, first we need to recognize that defining anything less than 100 percent as failure makes a fine aspirational goal, but it makes poor public policy. Whether defined as a zero-tolerance drug policy, universal adoption, or no child left behind; policy is always best implemented when it is guided by rational discretion over aspirational ideology.