Funds needed to bridge rural ‘digital divide’

No one’s sure when Sonoma County’s rural residents will enjoy the same high-speed Internet access their urban neighbors now depend on as a basic tool of daily life, county officials conceded last week.
“I wish I had an answer,” said Cazadero resident Mike Nicholls, co-chair of the Access Sonoma Broadband project that’s looking at ways to bring broadband Internet to residents now coping with slow or non-existent Internet service.
“Three years ago I figured this would be easy,” said Nicholls, 5th District Supervisor Efren Carrillo’s appointment to the Sonoma County Economic Development Board that is working on the slow or no Internet service problems in rural Sonoma County.
“It has become impossible to lead one’s life, or conduct one’s business without adequate broadband access,” says an Access Sonoma Broadband report on the problem. “Throughout the world broadband is now recognized as a basic human right.”
The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) last week awarded a $250,000 planning grant to local counties including Sonoma where rural Internet service is bad or non-existent. The grant to the recently formed North Bay/North Coast Broadband Consortium (NBNCBC) will be used to help plan for telecommunications broadband deployment and services to unserved and underserved areas in Marin, Mendocino, Napa and Sonoma counties.  
The grant, though small, will be augmented by “a significant amount of in-kind and volunteer resources in each county,” said Nicholls, who has been instrumental as a volunteer in the local effort to “close the digital divide” in western and northern Sonoma County.
NBNCBC has identified 30 priority areas across Marin, Mendocino and Sonoma counties that are rated as unserved or underserved as not having any services, or services that do not meet minimum broadband speeds.
Priority areas in Sonoma County include Jenner, Cazadero, Dry Creek Valley, Alexander Valley and the Sea Ranch.
Sea Ranch residents have already launched a project to bring fiber-based broadband to that community and residents in the Joy Road area have formed a working group and have been gathering information for the past several months, said Nicholls.
Dry Creek and Alexander valleys are two areas where Nicholls has been helping to “ground truth” the actual level of broadband service compared with the coverage claimed by “incumbent” Internet service providers such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T.
The incumbent providers have inaccurately claimed they provide wider coverage to the county’s rural areas than is actually available on the ground, say broadband advocates.
State and federal broadband policy and grant funding decisions are based on broadband service maps that are inaccurate because the incumbent service providers such as Comcast can claim more widely available high-speed internet access owing to a deficient mapping system. If broadband service is available to a single address within a federal census block, the entire census block is considered to be served, according to the existing system.
“In rural areas, census blocks are large, and provided service, when even available, is often much less than the advertised service,” according to Access Sonoma Broadband. “This means that service actually provided in rural areas is often greatly exaggerated in the national and California broadband maps, causing grant funding to be denied for critically needed broadband deployment projects.”
Schools are among priority problem areas suffering from slow and non-existent Internet service. Cazadero’s Montgomery School was recently able to upgrade to high-speed access on campus, but when some kids go home they are still dealing with slow or no high-speed Internet service. “There’s a horrible disparity for kids in rural areas” compared with students in urban settings, said Nicholls.
Besides accepting the grant funding last week the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved formation of an NBNCB Oversight Committee and appointed 5th District Supervisor Carrillo to represent Sonoma County on the committee.
The two-year grant will support the local effort “to continue to work collaboratively with our three counties to help meet our goals to close the digital divide,” said Carrillo.
“The wonderful part about this grant is that we will see continued local broadband regional coordination in sharing better mapping, working with the information systems division and GIS as well as insuring that we meet the demands of our constituents. This is not only important to the economy but also important to the various parties in our communities, whether they’re schools, libraries, fire districts and emergency systems, to insure connectivity.”