What did America look like at the turn of the 20th Century? It was an age of advancement, and the most important feature was the emerging middle class, which fueled the labor supply for the Industrial Revolution creating new markets in military goods, manufacturing, travel, and leisure. Teddy Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act in 1906, helping to protect National Landmarks. Technological advances included the phonograph, light bulb, machine gun, air conditioning, airplanes, and drip brew coffee. Progress was on the march, but it was leaving populations behind. Children worked arduous jobs earning a couple of dollars a day if they were lucky. Women could still not vote.
Needless to say, we have come a long way, experiencing exponential growth socially, governmentally, and economically. In fact, we have come such a long way that we humans have literally redistributed across our continental boundaries. Since 1900, the Rural:Urban population ratio has shifted from 60:40 to 20:80. The Transcontinental Railroad laid the framework in 1869 for how a national economy could exist enticing many people to migrate toward urban sprawls anticipating new opportunity and shifts toward consumer-centricism.
The cheery and romantic story is that this immense volume of people that picked up and left their homes were pursuing the American Dream. There are always two sides to every story. Chasing opportunity in once place meant fleeing the lack of it elsewhere. Massive infrastructure builds for commercial electricity, telephones and highways contributed to the dramatic geographic shift in the population, diminishing opportunity in once populous areas. There are certainly other factors such as jobs, education, family and friends relocation (effectively a snowball effect), that have enticed people to want to move away from their rural roots. However, it was the infrastructure (noted in the graph above) that provided a platform for the urbanization of the nation.
Three Events that Shaped the Future
On November 15th 1896, Buffalo started to receive power from Niagara Falls some 20 miles away. The first metropolis to receive electrical transmission, steel, grain, and automobile organizations flourished in Buffalo for decades to follow. The rural-dwelling folks of western New York and Pennsylvania became immediate candidates for employment in Buffalo, driving population growth by 100,000 in roughly 5 years. Someone who grew up in Little Valley, New York, a place with comparitively few job opportunities, could now move to Buffalo to find a steady paying job.
On January 25th 1915, Alexander Graham Bell spoke to Thomas A. Watson - on a telphone line from New York to San Francisco. Later that year, radio transmission reached from New York to Arlington, Virginia. TThese wo incredible feats - accomplished in the span of a single year - encompassed decades of Bell’s work. These technologies were commercialized first through the military, second to the nation's most affluent people then through businesses and later public residential use. Communities such as Minneapolis, Minnesota; Hazelton, Pennsylvania; Elyria, Ohio; and Norfolk, Virginia built the necessary exchange technologies to allow for expansion and use that we see in today's world. Someone who grew up in Owatonna, Minnesota could now move to the Twin Cities to find work but still call Mom and Dad on the weekends to check in.
On August 13th 1956, the Laclede County project broke ground in exchange for asphalt as the first project using Interstate Construction Federal funding issued by Eisenhower’s 1956 Highway Aid Act. The Interstate System at its core was designed to revitalize blighted urban areas, connect small corridors of the country with distribution, and encourage suburbanites to commute to cities to further spur economic development. The aforementioned project empowered those living west of the Missouri River to more easily travel over the bridge to work in St. Louis via the Mark Twain Expressway. Now imagine a similar someone as the example above in Minnesota. This person can now move to St. Louis, call home on the weekends, and even come home once a month and for the holidays.
The Rural Broadband Moment
What about rural broadband? Consumer adoption has obviously come a long way since dial-up connections and LAN coverage in the 80s. However, unlike the three past infrastructure revolutions, the benefits of broadband have not been as evenly distributed. Urban areas have reaped most of the rewards from this technological advancement, leaving bucolics in the dust. As of 2014, 39 percent of the rural population lacked access to broadband at speeds necessary for advanced telecommunications and data transfer capability compared to only 4 percent of urban populations.
This statistic and others that tell the story of the rural-urban broadband divide cannot be treated lightly. Education and work opportunites are increasingly accessible only through digital platforms. A poignant example shows that 16 percent of schools in small towns and 21 percent of schools in rural areas still lack a fiber connection, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
The Future of Broadband and the Population Affect
The divide should be cause for concern, but there are a variety of programs set to improve the situation. Connect America Fund Phase II (CAF II) and an array of legislation by individual states (like the Broadband Accessibility Act of 2017 passed in Tennessee) are putting billions of dollars to work on bringing speeds beyond the suburbs. Fast forward to completeion - fiber builds are complete and speeds are faster than ever, even in the smallest towns. America is nearing equality of service. Is there now any real professional advantage to living in a city?
Broadband won't change lifestyle choices, but it will mean those educational and occupational opportunites won't have to be concentrated in urban areas. From 2003 to 2015, the share of workers doing some or all of their work away from their office increased from 19 to 24 percent nationwide. Returning to the previous infrastructure examples, with equivalent speeds, broadband becomes the same conduit between rural and urban life, just like electrical transmission, telephone service, and highway access. Except this time, it empowers people to access the same opportunities without having to to live in a dingy apartment on the west side of Manhattan paying extravagant rent, or even from needing a house in commuting distance in the suburbs.
The future remote worker figure will only continue to climb as the world sees more incredible technology advancements. Autonomous vehicles will permit commuters to work during travel, making previously unthinkable commutes acceptable. Virtual reality will allow even the most far flung works to meet "in person." Artificial Intelligence will orchestrate more and more in the background.
As we near this inflection point of broadband adoption, we need to think about how we can keep it there through investments in networking equipment, reliable connectivity, and automating archaic processes. Think back to our rural forebearers who moved away from the countryside to new cities. Their progeny generations hence may be the ones to eventually move back to their family roots. Jobs grow, and more people move in spurring further growth for big business. Reference the graph above one more time and imagine how these trend lines may descend and rise reverting back towards one another; and effectively, showcasing mass broadband adoption for an underserved demographic.
Sources:
Population Data: https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf
Broadband Adoption Data: https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progress-reports/2016-broadband-progress-report
Highway Infrastructure Data: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/50interstate.cfm
