Access to modern broadband infrastructure is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity for economic development and prosperity, for education, for medical care, and for full participation in our nation’s cultural life.
But incumbent interests are not getting rural communities the modern broadband infrastructure they need to fully participate in the 21st century.
Just as it happened 100 years ago when the Bell system and major power companies resisted bringing the new necessities of telephone and electricity to rural areas, today incumbent telephone and cable companies are not spending the resources necessary to extend their best networks into the less populated parts of the country, relegating rural residents to the status of second-class citizens in the digital age.
We overcame these biases last century through a variety of local initiatives, where local governments, co-ops, and private entrepreneurs stepped forward to deliver the infrastructure these rural communities needed to prosper. This ultimately led to the federal government stepping in and supporting these efforts through the New Deal's creation of the Rural Electrification Administration, which enabled local initiatives to expand and ultimately bring copper power and telephone wires to every building in America, despite the opposition of entrenched providers.
Today rural America faces the same dilemma of a century ago: a new cutting edge infrastructure is being deployed and they're at risk of being left behind. Again incumbent providers are having trouble justifying a business case for rural deployment, and again an increasing number of local initiatives are stepping into the breach to bring the power of fiber to every last home. Unfortunately as before these initiatives face ferocious opposition from entrenched industry players. But again as before these local efforts are determined to succeed because they know the future survival and development of their communities depends on it.
To this end in the fall of 2008 a group of rural fiber operators and entrepreneurs began collaborating on ways to assist each other in their vital efforts to bring a modern communications infrastructure to the large percentage of Americans that lives outside the main urban population centers. This group has now decided to create a formal organization outside the constraints of existing industry organizations that can speak for the diverse collection of local initiatives committed to getting rural communities connected and directly to the need to not just get rural America online but to bring the key infrastructure of the 21st century to every last home in our great nation: the power of full fiber networks.