Let’s build rural broadband the right way

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed more than 1,600 people across our state, online medicine was literally a matter of life and death.

Now, Delawareans, including rural residents, are two steps away from ensuring the lifeline of telemedicine is here to stay - and accessible to all.

First, the easy part: Gov. Carney has signed the bipartisan Telehealth Access Preservation and Modernization Act, permanently eliminating the pre-pandemic obstacles to online consultations with medical professionals.  I was proud to help spearhead this truly bipartisan effort - Democrats and Republicans coming together to pass common-sense reforms that will deliver real results.

Second: The federal government needs to take a smart approach to finishing the job of wiring rural areas for reliable high-speed broadband – an essential prerequisite for telemedicine. Here, too, progress will hinge on whether our leaders in Washington, D.C. can find the same bipartisan commitment to compromise and common sense.

For remote rural areas, like those in my Sussex County district, where medical specialists and broadband connections are all too scarce, we don’t have a day or a dollar to waste.

With Congress hammering out a massive infrastructure plan, we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes of the 2009 stimulus program. It committed $7 billion for rural broadband - but spent too many of these scarce taxpayer dollars on wasteful projects in areas that already had high-speed networks. Meanwhile, too many unserved rural communities lost out; a federal initiative expected to connect 7 million rural Americans eventually served only a few hundred thousand.

This time, we need to build out rural broadband the right way. 

Bipartisan proposals, like one from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. John Cornyn (D-TX), offer a glimpse at a smarter approach: focus federal funds on truly unserved areas, encourage the best providers and technologies to compete to deliver the best solutions, and avoid ideological landmines like municipally owned networks, which have failed in city after city.  

This bipartisan approach would also swat away the swarm of crony capitalists who’ve been angling to hijack infrastructure funds for their own preferred “solutions,” by playing games with speed mandates and eligibility requirements. Congress should be wary of those who would complicate a simple issue  - building broadband networks in communities where they don’t already exist - just to line their own pockets.

In truth, thanks to private investment, 98 percent of Delaware’s homes are already wired for broadband, with some of the nation’s fastest internet speeds.

But we need to accelerate solutions for the 21,000 Delawareans who don’t yet have broadband wires on their doorsteps, including 7 percent of Sussex County residents.

COVID-19 was a wakeup call to wire all our residents for broadband so they could access telemedicine. But now that COVID-19 cases and deaths are declining, we can’t just roll over and go back to sleep.

While the pandemic placed a premium on avoiding crowded emergency rooms and physicians’ offices, telemedicine still offers important advantages for rural residents - especially those without reliable transportation or those needing specialty care unavailable in smaller communities. These advantages are especially important for mental healthcare, which accounted for 55 percent of telehealth consultations across the country in February 2021.

Despite these attractions, rural residents are less likely than urban and suburban Americans to use telemedicine. In fact, from March to June 2020, 24 percent of appointments in urban areas, but only 14 percent of consultations in rural areas, were conducted by telehealth.

While I applaud Delaware libraries for launching three telehealth kiosks in Sussex County, we’ll be better off as a state when every family has the broadband connection needed to consult with medical professionals from the comfort and safety of their home.

That means expanding broadband infrastructure to every corner of our state - and making sure more of our neighbors are actually signing up and taking advantage of it. Even though high-speed service is widely available and broadband providers offer steeply discounted services for customers in need, only 76 percent of Delaware residents subscribe to broadband at home.

Clearly, our next priority should be helping all our families, urban and rural, understand why and how to get connected. Just as civic and religious organizations are canvassing door-to-door for vaccinations in Sussex County, we should conduct community outreach for broadband adoption and basic digital literacy training.

It’s a cause well worth working for. Now more than ever, access to the best medicine hinges on access to broadband. With stakes this high, we need a bipartisan commitment to get everyone connected.