Size of internet providers factors into Kansas’ rural broadband divide

Lauren Clary gets a sinking feeling when someone asks her if she’s watched a popular show on Netflix.

“I tell them, ‘Nope, I don’t have the internet at home,’” said Clary, who lives on a rural property near Lake Afton with her husband and young child. “It’s amazing how many people are shocked when you tell them that.”

But the Clarys are far from alone in having no or minimal internet access at home.

About 95,000 Kansas households have no access to the internet or lack what has been defined as the bare minimum of internet access, said state Rep. Mark Schreiber, an Emporia Republican and a member of the Statewide Broadband Expansion Planning Task Force.

Fast internet is so crucial to daily life that Kansans are finding creative workarounds, from turning their phones into hotspots to finding someplace nearby where they can access Wi-Fi.

If Clary needs something stronger than the cell phone hotspot she can access in her yard, she drives to her mother’s house in Wichita. Some schools in rural areas allow students to access their Wi-Fi from the parking lot on evenings and weekends. Businesses such as coffee shops that offer open signals also draw users, whether they’re open or not.

The coronavirus has raised the heat on the daunting challenge of too many Kansans being without high speed internet at home. In the midst of lockdowns that forced people to work from home and students to study remotely, a lack of broadband access became a problem that couldn’t be ignored.

“The silver lining of the pandemic is that all of a sudden, people went ‘This is really important, and we want it and need to make it happen,’” said Catherine Moyer, CEO of Pioneer Communications in Ulysses.

More state and federal funding has been made available to communities, but it won’t be nearly enough to fully remedy the problem.

Furthermore, expansion is intertwined with a host of issues. Should everyone have access to the same basic level of service and pay similar rates? Should areas of the state where it’s more cost-effective to provide service subsidize those areas where it’s not? Should broadband remain a private service provided by businesses, or should it be considered more like electricity, a necessity supplied by utilities that usually have no competition and face heavy government regulation?

And finally: Do policymakers have the political will to invest the resources when state revenues have been gyrating?

These questions remain mostly unanswered even as Kansas embarks upon expansion.

“Broadband is an interesting juxtaposition of opportunity,” said Stanley Adams, director of the Office of Broadband Development for the Kansas Department of Commerce. “Because what’s happened is a lot of folks who had a cursory understanding that broadband was important now have much richer context.”

He said lawmakers used to ask him ‘‘Why should we be investing in broadband so that somebody can watch Netflix? That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t seem reasonable.’ You’d have to explain, ‘Well, actually, it’s a lot more than that.’”

The pandemic has demonstrated that in a way no presentation to a legislative committee could, Adams said. The question now isn’t whether broadband networks should be improved – it’s how much and how soon.

“What we have right now is an opportunity in the next several months to leapfrog the state ahead, potentially, a decade in terms of making progress on broadband,” Kansas Secretary of Commerce David Toland said. “It’s both a very exciting time and it’s also a little bit harrowing to look at how much work needs to be done in this short window. But I’m confident that we can do it.”

Echoes of history

Across Kansas, rural communities were making progress before the pandemic. Rawlins County has gone from one of the state’s most unwired places to the host of a burgeoning internet-dependent manufacturing business targeting a niche in precision agriculture with the help of a small fiber optic provider. Tiny Timken in Rush County offers service that rivals or exceeds what can be found in the Kansas City suburbs. But such gains raise questions about what role the biggest providers should play. Even as they laud the efforts of the locals, rural Kansans express disappointment with the level of service they’re receiving from corporations such as AT&T.

The trajectory of broadband’s expansion is reminiscent of other significant advances in the state’s development. As railroads pushed west in the latter half of the 1800s to connect the coasts – and, more important, to open markets – farm towns flourished or faded depending on whether the railroad arrived or passed them by.

The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to lift the nation out of the Great Depression, brought electricity to rural America. Federal loans paid for the installation of electrical distribution systems, run by rural electric cooperatives – most of which still exist today.

The Communications Act of 1934, another piece of FDR’s New Deal legislation, made basic telephone service accessible and affordable to everyone. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 established a Universal Service Fund, which was supplied by fees added to long-distance bills to provide service in high-cost areas of the country.

Rural telephone companies, many of them operating as nonprofits, have used money from that fund to bring fiber to their customers.

“I can proudly say that 90% of our area has fiber to the home,” said Beau Rebel, general manager of Golden Belt Telephone Association, now known as GBT, which is based in Rush Center – a town of fewer than 200 people just south of Hays. “We’re working on (reaching) 100% every day.”

In many cases, fiber has been buried along railroad right-of-ways. GBT is one of 36 rural cooperatives and telecoms in Kansas that together cover about half of the state’s area, bringing fiber to hamlets as small as Timken, a town of a few dozen people northwest of Great Bend.

“I was absolutely flabbergasted that the internet here is so good,” said Angelia Frazier, who moved from outside of Leavenworth to Timken with her husband, Jonathan, when she got a job with the Department for Children and Families.

During the pandemic, she’s worked from home. That wouldn’t have been possible at their old place near Leavenworth, she said.

“If we still lived there, I could not do my job from home,” she said. “I’d have to go sit in a parking lot somewhere all day or at a McDonald’s.”

One of the reasons Invena Corp., a design-build manufacturing and distribution company in Eureka, acquired Emergency Fire Equipment in Mayfield was because the town of about 110 people in Sumner County has fiber, said Matt Wilson, Invena’s president and CEO.

“Fiber just got here last year,” Wilson said of Eureka, which is served by AT&T. “It’s atrociously expensive.”

Wilson called the disparity in service between the areas served by local phone companies and those by large providers “just unbelievable.”

There’s a lot of talk, Moyer said, about the urban-rural divide – about how urban America gets all these great things and rural America doesn’t.

When it comes to telecom and broadband service, she sees a rural-rural divide between customers served by local providers and those served by large companies.

Large providers still cover significant swaths of Kansas. The expectation, rural cooperative executives say, was that those companies would take the profits they earn in dense population centers and use them to provide the same level of service to rural areas in their service territory.

The reality, they say, is that those publicly traded providers have turned those profits into dividends and healthier bottom lines for shareholders. While that’s understandable from a business perspective, the executives say, it leaves some rural sectors with poor service.

‘Horrible’ broadband in state’s most underserved county

Jeff Zortman uses precision agriculture to maximize yields and minimize costs on the family farm in Meade County. The farm has been in the family since Solomon Zortman homesteaded 160 acres in 1884. Since then, it has grown to 6,000 acres.

Farmers may have been able to deduce how to make the most out of their land when farms were small, Jeff Zortman said. But that’s just not possible anymore.

“It just comes down to paying more and more attention to detail,” Zortman said. “Farmers have traditionally treated a whole field or even a whole farm all the same.”

Zortman uses soil samples taken little more than two acres apart to track soil nutrients and monitor how much fertilizer and water is needed. He’d like to specialize it in even smaller increments. Zortman said he had to take “extraordinary measures” to have access to fiber in Meade County. He learned a fiber line being laid to the school was being buried next to his house in Fowler.

“What can I do to get this?” he asked the crew.

“We paid way too much to get this to my house,” he now admits.

Zortman then set up an antenna at his house and pointed it toward a tower at his father’s house, which in turn feeds a signal to the farm shed 5 miles outside of town. The network doesn’t just allow him to manage the land, he said. His John Deere equipment is monitored by cell signals to let him know when issues arise or servicing is needed.

Zortman is an exception in Meade County. While farming is the county’s largest industry, most farmers can’t practice precision agriculture because, a state broadband study revealed, Meade is the most underserved county in Kansas.

“We absolutely have horrible, and I say horrible broadband connectivity here in Meade County,” said state Rep. Boyd Orr of Fowler.

Orr blames that on the fact that Meade County is served by AT&T.

“I understand that their return on investment … is not good coming into an area like Meade County,” Orr said. “If electricity had been treated the same way as we treated broadband, we probably still wouldn’t have electricity in Meade County.”

Internet access is so unreliable, Orr said, that students who live in rural areas drive to the school or library on evenings and weekends to log into the Wi-Fi to do their schoolwork.

Some homes have good broadband, Orr said. “But you get outside the towns, and it gets pretty poor very quickly.”

AT&T officials would not address specific coverage questions. Through the Connect America Fund initiative in 2017, AT&T committed to offering high-speed access to 35,000 rural homes and small businesses in Kansas by the end of this year

“We are on track to reach this goal,” spokesman Mark Giga said in an email.

But high-speed internet was defined as a download speed of 10 megabits per second and an upload speed of 1 megabit per second at the time - and that capacity could not handle the demands during the pandemic.

AT&T is expanding access to mobile wireless broadband in rural communities in its coverage area, including through the buildout of FirstNet, the new high-speed, nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety.

The upgrades should strengthen signals, expanding access to those lacking it and improving it for those with poor service, but Giga, the AT&T spokesman, couldn’t provide specifics on how much of an improvement it would be.

Even before the emergence of COVID-19, state leaders were ramping up efforts to expand broadband access. The Statewide Broadband Expansion Planning Task Force was set up in 2018 to explore expanding affording access to broadband. After 18 months, the task force presented recommendations to the Legislature, but only one got as far as the committee level before being shelved by the pandemic.

The 2020 Legislature did approve the Eisenhower Legacy Transportation Program, a 10-year plan that includes gradually increasing investment in broadband infrastructure.

The effort allocates $5 million a year for the first three years of the plan and then $10 million annually, for a total expenditure of $85 million.

While it’s not much compared with the need, Schreiber said, “It’s a lot more than what the Legislature has approved in the past.

“This is one of those things that I don’t think we can solve with one fell swoop,” Schreiber said. “It’s going to take time, and that’s why we have to prioritize: Identify where the weak areas are, prioritize which ones we’re going to build out to … and work that through a methodical process.”

One of the task force’s recommendations is to lift Kansas to the top 25% of states for broadband access. Broadband Now ranks Kansas 28th in access, prices and speeds. Most of the top 10 states are in New England, while Midwestern states such as Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas rank near the bottom. Colorado and Oklahoma rank just above Kansas, while Missouri lags behind.

An aggressive push begins

State officials, members of Congress, economic development directors and telecom CEOs say improving broadband access across the state has become vital.

“Connectivity today is as important as getting running water and electricity was when my parents were growing up,” said U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall, a Great Bend Republican who recently won the race for a seat in the U.S. Senate. “It would have the same consequences on the quality of life and the economics of life. You’re not going to be able to run a modern farm or a modern business without connectivity.”

The pandemic did more than just show how important connectivity is, said Toland, the state’s commerce secretary.

“When you’re suddenly thrust into a situation where people are having to work remotely, and go to school remotely, and visit their medical provider remotely, you find out really quickly where those deficiencies are and how work and life can and can’t get done,” Toland said.

Congress allocated $250 million to Kansas for coronavirus-related costs. The Strengthening People and Revitalizing Kansas task force, set up by Gov. Laura Kelly to oversee the disbursement of that money, identified connectivity as one of four priorities to be addressed with the aid.

The task force allocated $60 million for expanding connectivity around the state, including $10 million aimed specifically at coverage for low-income residents. The highest priority will be projects that make telemedicine possible, allowing hospitals to interact with patients remotely and permitting specialists in urban areas to weigh in via teleconferencing.

But according to Adams, it’s been the struggle that many Kansans have faced during the coronavirus outbreak as they tried to help their children succeed at remote learning that vaulted broadband from something theoretical to something real.

The Department of Commerce selected more than 60 broadband projects to be financed largely by the federal funding, along with more than 20 proposals to expand broadband access to low-income residents, Adams said.

All projects chosen will have to be completed by the end of the calendar year.

There’s a chance federal officials could extend the completion deadline for projects beyond the end of the year because of such things as a shortage of fiber availability, Adams said. It’s also possible Congress could make more money available.

The minimum broadband speed (a download speed of 25 megabits per second and an upload speed of 3 megabits per second) is considered the floor, not the ceiling, of the service that state officials want to see. But telecom executives say such minimum speeds won’t be enough to handle even basic needs in a few years.

Unlike the infrastructure projects, Adams said, the low-income component of the grant has no application deadline.

Cox Communications, which serves 92 communities across Kansas, is working with school districts to offer its Connect2Compete service to families that qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, public affairs spokesperson Mandy Wilbert said. Families that sign up will get their first two months free, she said, and school districts plan to pay the ensuing $9.95 monthly fee using money from the federal CARES Act. Several school districts across the state have already signed up to provide that assistance, she said.

The Wichita School District, for example, has applied for money from the CARES Act. Otherwise, internet services for students will be paid out of the capital outlay section of the district’s budget.

Opportunity beckons

While improving health care is the highest priority for this round of federal funding, officials say the economic benefits of strengthening the state’s broadband network are close behind. Businesses and industries who found overseas supply chains cut off by pandemic-related shutdowns are looking to bring operations back to the U.S, Toland said. For workers whose employers have shifted their employees to remote labor, COVID-19 is a reminder that people don’t necessarily need to live where the job is.

“We are shouting from the rooftops about the opportunities that exist in Kansas from a quality of life perspective, from a business perspective,” Toland said. “Our geography provides us with a lot of advantages that have really been brought into stark relief because of COVID.”

Avoiding the ax

But the push to expand broadband is coming at the same time that state officials have to navigate a confounding budget situation.

By June of next year, the budget shortfall is predicted to reach $1.3 billion. So it’s possible that legislators in the 2021 session could agree that broadband expansion is necessary and still cut funding.

Politics will likely play a role in how much support for broadband expansion comes from the federal level too.

Because the areas in need of broadband expansion are more commonly rural and Republican, U.S. Rep. Ron Estes of Wichita said, “it does get caught up into politics at times.”

“It’s not a perfect world out there,” Estes said. “I do think there’s more and more visibility on the part of both Democrats as well as the Republicans that there’s need out there, and we need to keep pushing on that.”

Meanwhile off the beaten path in Sedgwick County, the Clarys have run out of patience.

“We’re looking to move into town,” Lauren Clary said, “and the internet is one of the reasons.”

This is a condensed version of a story that originally appeared in The Journal, a magazine published by the Kansas Leadership Center. To read the uncondensed version, visit https://klcjournal.com/broadbanddivide2020.