In 2019, Corona was a popular beach beer rather than a deadly respiratory virus and no Mississippian had really ever seriously contemplated a development in which public schools, community colleges and universities would be closed, and academic content would be delivered through online means.
But for years prior to 2019, rural Mississippians had fumed over molasses-slow internet speeds and the inability to shop, communicate, stream or enjoy full use of technology due to the lack of rural broadband.
Enter Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, a distant cousin of singer Elvis Presley and an unabashedly proud populist Democrat from Nettleton.
Presley orchestrated something just short of a political miracle. With Republicans firmly in control of the Mississippi House of Representatives, State Senate and the Governor’s Mansion, Presley seized on the pent-up frustration of rural Mississippians aggravated by the fact that they didn’t have strong and reliable internet access while their more urban neighbors and relatives had internet choices that were both less expensive and faster.
So potent was Presley’s rural broadband political army that when the idea went to the Mississippi House in the form of House Bill 366, Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn’s name was first on the list of legislative sponsors. The bill passed with virtually no opposition.
And why not? At that time, 60 percent of Mississippians living in rural areas lacked high speed internet access. That translated into some 368,000 Mississippians who don’t have access to broadband internet that meets the basic speed standard set by the Federal Communications Commission.
House Bill 366 allowed allows Mississippi’s member-owned electric power associations or EPAs to deliver broadband internet through a subsidiary. EPAs serve about half of the state’s population and had up until the 2019 legislation passed been blocked by a 1942 law from any business other than providing electric power.
But getting the bipartisan rural broadband bill passed in Mississippi was only a fraction of the battle. When the COVID-19 crisis hit rural Mississippi, many of the state’s EPAs were still struggling with the costs of the proposition. Another obstacle is the time and logistics necessary to move from the drawing board to reality.
The political battles between the EPAs and their customers have at times been contentious. But leaders of the EPAs have been unwilling to accept undue risks to their member-owners in the process of exploring federal grants and other funding sources in addition to local customers.
But Presley’s grassroots message about the need for rural broadband was without question strengthened by the COVID-19 online education component.
Presley recently told The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal newspaper in Tupelo: “We’re telling our people, and rightfully so, to stay home and stay off the roads and do not congregate. But then they’re between the devil and the deep blue sea because they’ve got children that have got to do their homework and people have to work and telecommute. And guess what? They’ve got to go somewhere. So, they congregate at McDonalds or at the WIFI hotspot at the library.”
He’s right. The lack of rural broadband drove many rural students last month to Mississippi State University Extension offices statewide, where they would utilize WIFI available in the parking lots.
If the COVID-19 crisis and the unintended consequences it spawned in education at all levels does not force Mississippi and the rest of rural America to confront the issue of rural broadband, perhaps nothing will. Parents forced essentially into homeschooling during the crisis had enough problems without the inability to have functional internet services.
How bad is the problem? The Tupelo newspaper, citing information gleaned from the broadbandnow.com website, reported this nugget: “The average internet speed in the state, according to the website, is 37.5 megabytes per second. Around 80 percent of Mississippians have access to internet speeds of 100 megabytes per second, a speed would allow a user to perform more activities. These statistics mean that roughly 595,000 Mississippians do not have access to an internet speed with 100 megabytes or more.”
Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.
Kingfish note: Pole fees, Sid, pole fees. Pole fees had a great deal to do with why rural broadband did not exist. The bill was passed over a year ago. What progress has been made?
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Sid Salter: School Closings Expose Mississippi's Broadband Deficiencies
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16 comments:
Megabytes per second instead of megabits per second?
Writing about things with such authority you don't even understand. This is the state or "journalism" today. Who pays for this shit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-rate_units#Megabit_per_second
He smell that Fed money fixing to drop
USB cables are measured in megabytes per second
Residential internet is measured in megabits per second.
This article is just plain stupid. Boomers shouldn't try to write about technology that they can't properly comprehend.
South Korea has the fastest internet in the world, but not in rural villages. Nobody has good internet in rural areas because the lack of population density renders it economically unfeasible to invest in "the last mile" but Elon Musk is launching a bunch of micro-satellites that he is planning to turn on wireless internet world wide.
The electric co-ops won't qualify for the federal money because their business plans are dependent on their initial build out in the densely populated areas (aka incorporated areas) where there is already competitive broadband. They'll be left to finance construction on the backs of their electrical customers. And when it all comes tumbling down, Brandon Presley will have bullied them right into bankruptcy.
3 Thoughts.
The plan are in the works for broadband connection.
NOV 2019 Elon Musk's SpaceX on Monday launched 60 more Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, bringing the company's Starlink satellite broadband internet service closer to its planned mid-2020 go-live date for the US and Canada.
The Monday launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is one of six more launches required to deliver coverage to North America. It was the second Falcon 9 launch carrying a payload of 60 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched the first 60 "production design" Starlink satellites in May, representing a small fraction of the 12,000 the Federal Communications Commission has approved Starlink to operate in space. Starlink may one day have as many as 30,000 Starlink satellites in operation.
2. Splinter internet
Many countries are walling off their internet. China, Russia, etc.
This will splinter the internet. You heard it here 1st on KF blog!
3. Their a website called invisible girlfriend where you, can make up your ideal girlfriend.
Country has always had to come to town for the amenities. Rural kids have always been behind city kids on education. Government can't fix that.
BTW, your hero Elon just named his baby x æ a-12.
Yeah. Imma hop on that rocket with him.
Ima fixin to be buyin some of Elon's sh*t he dont want no more for bottom dolla! Houses, cars, stocks, bonds, stereos ,megabytes whatever he be dumpin!
Good luck with that. Rural will always be playing catch-up. I live 2.5 miles from the local phone office and my max speed is 10 Mbps for which I pay $60 per month. They haven’t upgraded the system in years and still use the copper lines laid down decades ago. Unless the rural electric cooperatives can run internet through power lines I doubt they will be able to provide the service any more economically as running lines will be expensive.
Other than nurse from the tax payer teat...what does this guy do??!!
The Tupelo newspaper and Sid Salter are equally uninformed with respect to this issue. They should stick to sports reporting and Elvis trivia articles. Bits per second (bps) or bytes per second (Bps) are interchangeable -- they only differ by a factor of 8 (i.e. 8 bits is traditionally 1 byte). Just stick with millions of bits per second (Mbps). It works for any kind of digital data throughput.
Commissioner Presley is a broadband evangelist and I applaud his efforts. However, I am skeptical of his stated mandate for gigabit bandwidths into every home.
Do you wonder why the FCC defines broadband as 25/3 megabits per second (Mbps for download/upload)? Have any of the symmetric gigabit (i.e. 1000 Mbps download and upload) zealots ever put a pencil to paper to see what kind of aggregate bandwidth an average residential family might simultaneously use to do the major online things?
6 Mbps for an HD movie stream
6 Mbps for an on-line work/learning audio/video conference
8 Mbps for background file uploads/downloads
<8 Mbps for miscellaneous web browsing, music, etc.
Looks like 25 megabits of dependable, low-latency (not satellite) symmetric bandwidth would satisfy a great portion of residential needs. Gamers, commercial high-volume users, and content hosters would need more -- and should pay appropriately more for it. The EPAs seem to have settled on $85/month pricing for 1000 Mbps service and $55/month for 100 Mbps. AT&T charges $90/month for fiber-to-the-home symmetric 1000 Mbps service in North Mississippi. No low income family can/will afford any of those prices. Try $20/month for a dependable 25 Mbps -- they might go for that and it would likely serve almost every online need they might have. Problem is, the EPAs can't do FTTH to every home at the needed subscriber take rate (70% of households) to afford a pure FTTH for every customer. My local EPA says they need about $100 million to build out their complete fiber network. That's pure insanity. Make them show you the cost analyses that clearly justify that line of business for them.
I could go on but I'm tired of typing -- and no, I don't work for any communications carriers or contractors. But I do know the difference between bits and bytes...
I don't know dodo about bytes, if it was profitable to sling cable to country phone and cable companies would have already did it. Subsiding monthly bills isn't the issue. It's the upfront infrastructure cost. Folks are dieing and leaving everyday and the cost per mile keeps going up.
you don't know dodo bout much
it wasn't profitable for the infrastructure of fiber optic in urban areas until the federal government subsidized it
you wouldn't have that high speed internet 'cept for government subsidy
@3:49 yep thanks to Al Gore. The mouthbrethers will pareot jingoistic platitudes. But the reality is Al spearheaded the legislation to fund the information superhighway and because of the government funding we had the dot com boom which has sustained us for the decades since.
Schools would be in better shape if they hadn't been tied to that decade plus state contract with AT&T where they paid a premium for service and AT&T had zero incentive to improve. it's interesting to see Tate get religion on this issue now when he didn't have the time of day for school district tech folks for years.
Presley is a snake. He is going to try a run at Gov and this is his golden pony.
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