The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Most households in Ohio’s Appalachian counties don’t have reliable access to the internet.
About 75% of people and about a third of households in Ohio’s 32 Appalachian counties don’t have access to the Federal Communications Commission’s bare minimum internet speed, according to Connecting Appalachia, an advocate for last-mile broadband deployment in Appalachian Ohio.
“A lot of our areas have no broadband and homes have no cellular service,” said Tom Reid, President of Reid Consulting Group who works with Connecting Appalachia.
“You’re talking about taking an area basically back to the 1930s,” he said.
Buckeye Hills Regional Council conducted a 2019 study that shows 80% to 90% of households (in areas with 20 or fewer households per square mile) have no access to broadband. The study looked at Athens, Hocking, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Noble, Perry and Washington counties.
“It completely changes your life if you don’t have access to the internet,” said Ryan Collins, the former program manager at Buckeye Hills Regional Council. He is now the policy manager at the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.
People might wait until the middle of the night to log on to the internet when there are less people fighting for service.
Or they might go to McDonald’s just to use their wifi and then continue to sit in the parking lot after the fast food restaurant closes for the day, but that’s only if they have reliable transportation. Same with the library or local cafes.
A business owner might have to go to the library at the end of the day with a credit card reader machine to run credit cards because they aren’t able to get hooked up to the internet.
“People figured out all these workarounds, but they shouldn’t have to figure out workarounds,” Reid said. “People deserve to have the services in their homes.”
It can also make everyday things like sending a text message, working remotely and streaming videos herculean tasks.
“You literally can’t reach these people,” Reid said. “You have to drive to their house to have contact with them.”
Broadband access issues can prevent people from moving to the region.
“They know what it’s like to have the internet and the internet is one of the number one things that people check on now when they’re moving to a new area,” Collins said.
People can pay for line extensions to their homes, but that can cost thousands of dollars.
“Or they go with a subpar internet service just because ‘hey, at least I have something that’s better than nothing’,” Collins said.
According to the FCC, 25 megabits per second (mbps) with 3 mbps upload speed is the minimum standard for internet speed.
Broadband access varies county by county. If there is a high concentration of the population in a certain area, the internet can be more reliable.
For example, the internet is more stable closer to Ohio University than in other parts of Athens.
“Internet service providers can make a business case for building out there, rather than building out into the rural areas,” Collins said.
History of broadband in Ohio’s Appalachian counties
According to the FCC, just under 4% of Ohio’s broadband serviceable locations are “unserved” meaning they have no access to a service with speeds of 25/3 Mbps or greater using copper, fiber or cable.
Internet carriers file mapping data with the FCC twice a year, but Reid said the maps aren’t always accurate.
“That’s like leaving the fox in charge of the hen house,” said Amesville Mayor Gary Goosman.
If there is one person with internet access in a census tract, the providers will go ahead and say the entire census tract is covered with service, he said.
For example, the FCC map showed a portion of Meigs County having broadband service, but in reality, only one of 14 households was serviced by Frontier Communications at 10/1 speed (less than the minimum), according to the Buckeye Hills Regional Council 2019 survey results.
“Eliminating the Digital Divide is a top priority for the FCC,” a FCC spokesman said in an email.
People can submit challenges to the maps and the FCC has processed over 4.8 million challenges and incorporated the results of 1.5 million challenges.
“The Map will continue to be updated to reflect the results of challenges, verifications, audits and new biannual collections,” a FCC spokesman said in an email.
Connecting Appalachia uses the Ookla Speedtest Intelligence Data to get more accurate results with broadband access.
Another part of the reason for the lack of broadband access are the old copper wires that have been in place in Southeast Ohio since the 1950s.
“The insulation on the wires has just deteriorated,” Reid said. “That’s why whenever it rains, we lose our phone service because the water shorts out those signals.”
Fiber is the key
Building fiber is crucial to fixing the broadband issue, Reid said.
“We really have to have fiber to the home,” he said. “And fiber is the only solution right now. … fixed wireless just can’t accomplish the goal.”
It will cost approximately $2.1 billion to provide fiber optic broadband to every unserved household in the region and internet providers need close to $1.6 billion in government subsidy for this to be sustainable, according to Connecting Appalachia.
Appalachian Ohio’s beautiful rolling hills and topography can actually make it more challenging for the area to get reliable broadband access by making it difficult to get satellite signals, Reid said.
Wireless and satellite providers mean the signal is coming through the air. Wired infrastructure means the signal is coming from a physical cable — which can give a higher speed internet connection.
Amesville
The fastest internet speeds in the 170-person village of Amesville in Athens County is 5/1 — at least 20 times slower than the broadband minimum, Goosman said.
“The more usage, the more it slows,” he said. “These are old copper phone lines. If everybody’s streaming a movie, or trying to do work or whatever, then it just gets slower and slower.”
He is able to do some work online, such as send emails for grants and water testing, but it’s not always reliable.
“It’s an annoyance,” Goosman said. “It just feels like you can’t leave a segment of the country behind and expect the whole country to be prosperous, innovative and moving forward.”
Funding
Millions of dollars in funding from the federal and state level have poured into Ohio’s Appalachian region to help improve broadband access in Ohio’s Appalachian region.
The Ohio Residential Broadband Expansion Grant is designed to fund last-mile broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas currently lacking access to reliable, high-speed internet.
The $232 million grant program was signed into law by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in May 2021 and it will help an estimated 230,000 residents have better broadband access.
DeWine recently announced projects selected by Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to improve broadband access across parts of Ohio’s Appalachian region: $2.49 million in Ashtabula County, $2.49 in Morgan County, $1 million in Tuscarawas County and $46,000 in Perry County.
Earlier this year, the ARC gave $6.3 million to Connect Humanity to help expand broadband access in a handful of states, including Ohio.
The Biden administration over the summer announced $42.45 billion to connect all Americans to high-speed broadband internet by the end of the decade. Ohio will receive $793.68 million.
The funding comes from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program established under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Ohio submitted their first phase of the proposal in September. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration must approve the plan before Ohio receives the rounds of funding, meaning it will likely take a year or two until things start really moving under the BEAD program, Collins said.
“It’s just a lot of money to throw at the issue,” he said. “Especially reliable internet build out because a lot of focus is probably going to be on fiber to the home rather than wireless internet.”
