AgWired

I’m not sure where you would come down on the idea of stimulus money being spent on the continuing development of rural broadband but I’m all for it. Thanks to rural_broadband’s heads up on Twitter I thought you’d be interested in these two stories.

The first one is from NPR, “Stimulus Stirs Debate Over Rural Broadband Access.” In it they quote former FCC Economist, Michael Katz. He’s obviously a city boy who doesn’t have a clue. Here’s an example of what I mean.

But he also spoke of rural places as environmentally hostile, energy inefficient and even weak in innovation, simply because rural people are spread out across the landscape.

Dude, could you possibly show more of your arrogance and ignorance? Fortunately this is a pretty well-balanced story as the following shows.

Rural advocates say high-speed access is a necessity in a global economy, and a critical part of economic revival and survival for rural places. Obama agreed during his campaign for president. His rural platform included this plank:

“Barack Obama will ensure that our rural Americans have access to modern communications infrastructure. He will … [promote] affordable broadband coverage across rural America as well.”

Let’s hope he keeps that pledge.

Then there’s another story pointed to in this article which is on the Daily Yonder titled, “Broadband Connection Highs and Lows Across Rural America.” The article pulls data from the Census of Agriculture and PEW Internet surveys. We’ve pointed to them before but this article has some nice charts and summaries of the data like the following.

Over 2.2 million farms were included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Census, which is conducted every five years. In 2002, the Census found that half the farms in the country were connected to the Internet in some way (broadband or dial-up). By 2007, the percentage of farms with some kind of Internet connection inched up to 56.5%.

However, only 33% of farms in 2007 had broadband connections.

In a chart showing internet and broadband percentage for farmers by state it was interesting to see that Connecticut had the highest percentage of farmers with broadband and Mississippi had the lowest. We need to get some of that broadband stimulus money going in the deep south!