Lack of broadband hurts rural areas

By Rudi Keller

Southeast Missourian

When businesses scout locations for a new office, warehouse or production facility, they generally want the land to have three things -- good roads, good pipes and good wires.

The roads bring employees and supplies and take away products. The pipes bring water, gas and remove sewage. The wires bring electricity and communications.

More and more today, the wires are no good if they don’t bring high-speed broadband Internet service. And in rural areas of Missouri, the likelihood of finding broadband goes down dramatically in smaller communities compared to larger ones.

A broadband study by the Missouri Public Service Commission, issued in early September, found that in small telephone exchanges -- those with 100 to 1,000 subscribers -- just over 50 percent of the households have access to Digital Subscriber Line, or DSL, service. In 107 of 375 such exchanges, the telephone company did not offer broadband. In 31 of those exchanges, the local cable television company provided some broadband service.

In contrast, only 11 of 267 telephone exchange out of with more than 1,000 households aren’t offering broadband service.

Area communities without broadband coverage include Daisy in Cape Girardeau County, Gipsy in Bollinger County and McGee in Wayne County. Some Southeast Missouri communities have won approval from the USDA for development loans to provide broadband, including Jackson, Poplar Bluff, Qulin, Fisk, Dudley and Puxico, among others. There are several communities with loans pending, including Advance, Bell City, East Prairie, Whitewater, Glenallen and Sedgewickville.

While telephone and cable television companies report exchanges where they offer broadband, it doesn’t give the full picture because broadband can also be found on cellular telephone signals and via satellite connections, although both can be much more expensive. And even the reported figures don’t clearly show where broadband is and isn’t available, because the signal degrades when it is more than about 3 miles from what is known as an area multiplexer, or DSLAM.

In areas that have no broadband, attracting people with good incomes can be difficult, Scott Lindsay, president of the Rural Broadband Coalition, told the Southeast Missourian in May. “People do locate specifically because they have broadband access,†Lindsay said.

Scott County’s chief of economic development, Joel Evans, chose his house based on broadband availability when he moved to the area, he said. His wife works in a sales job that requires broadband access, which prevented the couple from building a home in rural Scott County. Instead, they live in Sikeston.

Evans has been tracking where broadband is offered in Scott County by monitoring the plans of business to install broadband access lines. “It is beginning to be a problem in rural areas, and I think it will be more of a problem in the future,†he said.