The federal government made more than $65 billion dollars in funding for broadband projects available to states with the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act in 2021. Now, the states are working to determine what broadband needs exist and the most efficient ways to address them.
Robbie McBeath is a visiting broadband coordinator with the Illinois Broadband Lab, operating out of the University of Illinois. The lab serves as a “one-stop shop” for data on broadband and digital equity initiatives.
“The state broadband office, they had been trying to, you know, manage hundreds of millions of dollars in broadband funding and do broadband programming with a really, really small staff,” said McBeath. “And so the idea was how can we kind of leverage resources across the state to really deliver better services and information.”
Still in its infancy, the lab is spending this first year crafting plans to submit to the Department of Commerce, making recommendations on how to spend the federal funding on goals like closing the digital divide and offering more digital equity and opportunity.
McBeath said these plans come with a lot of requirements.
“One of them is to ultimately get a snapshot of digital equity in your state, what residents are saying, connect with stakeholder groups, what's known as covered populations,” said McBeath. “This might be veterans, people with lower incomes, minority populations, just a whole host of different people that generally statistically are shown to be kind of on the other side of the digital divide, or experiencing digital inequities or lack of opportunities.”
One of the ways they’re collecting data is a listening tour. From March to May, McBeath hosted more than 50 public listening sessions across the state, hearing from people affected by two kinds of distinct digital divides: an access divide and an adoption divide.
Someone lacking “adoption” has no options for broadband providers, either because they live in a remote area or costs are unaffordable for them. Someone who lacks “access” has a broadband provider, but at a rate of less than 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second upload. That baseline is considered “served.”
While around 90% of the state is served, McBeath said only between 68% and 72% have adopted broadband in their home. There’s a wide range of advantages to having fast and reliable internet access in your home.
“That meant I could ... continue working remotely, maybe it might mean my child would be able to attend school without significant interruptions,” said McBeath. “And just the freedoms and a lot of the creativity that the internet ultimately provides become available. It might mean tele-medicine, it might mean banking opportunities, it might mean a whole host of things.”
A lack of broadband access also can be a safety issue, he said.
“There was one person in particular that really struck out, where they were a 65-year-old resident of Schuyler (County) in a very remote area of the county,” said McBeath. “And there was concern around you know: ‘if anything happens to me, or I need to contact or have emergency communications, my unreliable Internet access is a barrier to that,’ which is actually kind of a scary situation to be in.”
High-speed broadband access also has implications for farming and agriculture. McBeath said access to advancing technology in the field is crucial and farmers need reliable communication options for their business.
“It's millions of dollars that you're talking about,” he said. “If we were able to expand high-speed access to farms, and other kinds of agriculture based communities, you'd see a huge economic and agricultural yield because of that.”
With expanding broadband for agricultural purposes comes expanding to rural areas as well. McBeath said it can be surprising where these unconnected communities exist.
“We've heard someone say, ‘Yeah, I live five miles away from the state capitol, in Springfield, and I have zero access,’” he said. “So even that kind of close geography to a place like Springfield, you still have totally unconnected homes.”
At the end of the listening tour, McBeath has dozens of hours of information about the state of broadband connectivity across Illinois. The job now is synthesizing it with other data at the Broadband Lab and creating recommendations for the state.
McBeath said this will also require local and state governments working closely with internet providers to find opportunities for incentives, matching grants and projects that municipalities can collaborate on to expand digital access.
“It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity, but it's also a multi-year, multi-step process; the digital divide is not going to be closed quickly overnight,” said McBeath. “So it's going to take local leaders, local county leaders to be in sync and engaged and in a position where they can take advantage of these funds and direct them where they need to go over the course of several years.”
You can find more information about the Illinois Broadband Lab, including a survey to submit your own experience, here.
