Getting broadband into rural areas is difficult everywhere. Is the United States, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren contends, doing a poor job of expanding high-speed internet to rural areas? Not compared to other countries, writes Will Rinehart:
Every country struggles with getting broadband into hard-to-reach places, yet Warren still chides policymakers because the United States doesn’t have the same speed and access as Europe. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report she cites undermines her argument that the United States is an outlier, however. The report explains that “the United States had higher deployment rates than the EU21 countries as a whole during the period both generally and separately in rural and non-rural areas.” Further, while the United States does come in tenth place for average download speed among developed countries, it is dense countries such as Denmark, Japan, and South Korea—where it is much easier to deploy fast Internet broadly—that rank higher.
Getting broadband into rural areas is a difficult task regardless of the country, and other countries are struggling just like the United States is. Former Norwegian Minister for Transport and Communication Ketil Solvik-Olsen faced criticism for his government’s inability to get rural coverage in northern Norway. Despite besting the United States in the rankings, Denmark too struggles with getting broadband in the countryside. And while the German government has spent serious money in a project similar to Warren’s, experts have warned that there is “‘no way’ Germany could get all its citizens connected via fibre or terrestrial mobile.”
[Will Rinehart, “Corporations Aren’t the Problem with Internet Access,” American Action Forum, September 3]
