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Perspective | It’s time to stop thinking of broadband as a luxury

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If you are like me, your email has been flooded with stories about COVID-19 lately. Most articles use faceless data like unemployment figures, infection rates, and economic losses to paint a sobering picture of an unpredictable global health crisis with an uncertain outcome. One story, however, had a face. It was an article about a Lenoir County high school student travelling three miles every day to access Wi-Fi so he could complete online assignments because he did not have broadband at home.

That story stuck with me because it is an experience known too well by our rural communities, long before COVID-19 brought the importance of broadband access into our larger public dialogue.

At the NC Rural Center, we’ve been actively advocating for broadband expansion for the past five years, and we applaud the significant, bipartisan measures that seek to better connect all corners of North Carolina. One example is the Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) program, which is an effort passed by the NC General Assembly and administered by the State Broadband Infrastructure Office to provide grants to help deploy broadband service to unserved areas.

State-level polices like GREAT are a significant step in the right direction, but as COVID-19 continues to impact our state, it’s clear that now is the time to act on this issue at an even higher order of magnitude.

Flattening the curve and keeping North Carolinians healthy during this time gets easier when people can visit their doctors through telehealth services and students and teachers can access online learning platforms at home. And as we at the Rural Center are seeing firsthand, broadband is a lifeline, keeping many businesses and nonprofits running during these times of social distancing and sheltering-in-place.

And it’s not just COVID-19 that is raising greater awareness about the importance of broadband access. For the first time, the decennial census is available online, with the goal to make completing the census as easy as possible. But without broadband, the very mechanism intended to ensure an accurate count in places already at risk for an undercount is rendered ineffective.

Our efforts to expand broadband to all of North Carolina cannot end when this pandemic ends or when the last person is counted in the census. While some small, rural broadband providers have stepped up during this time to provide free hot spots for rural students, they alone cannot shoulder the costs of expanding this essential service.

Expanding broadband access and affordability will require a significant, increased fiscal allocation, public-private partnerships that leverage existing assets, and a commitment from every sector to not stop advocating until every household is connected, down to the last mile.

Our rural communities know all too well that broadband is a necessity, not a luxury — for education, healthcare, and economic development. Broadband is an infrastructure no less important for a community’s economic future than the electricity that runs to their homes. Broadband is a necessity today as we navigate an unprecedented global pandemic, and it will be a necessity for tomorrow as we reignite our economy after COVID-19.