Internet access is increasingly becoming essential for almost everything people want or need to do in their modern lives. It helps operate smart appliances, farm equipment and even automotive parts.
Last week Lt. Governor Matt Pinnell met with the Board of Directors at Central Electric CO-OP and talked about how the State of Oklahoma and organizations like CEC are working to get all Oklahomans connected.
It’s both a quality of life and an economic development issue.
Although the balance is tipping toward urban areas, more than one third of Oklahoma’s almost 4 million residents live in rural areas, according to the USDA. And an estimated 25% of the state's population doesn’t have internet service, the Oklahoman reported in July.
The situation has improved since 2015, when 49% of the state — 89% in rural areas — lacked access to at least 25 megabits per second in download speed, what federal regulators at the time considered the minimum standard for high-speed, according to the online publication Government Technology.
Building that access will be a huge undertaking, similar to the electrification projects that brought power to rural homes in the 1930s, and federal funding is again needed to make it possible.
The federal government is making billions of dollars available to providers who will extend fast, reliable internet service to rural and under-served areas, including parts of Oklahoma that struggle just to get quality cell phone service. President Joe Biden has said broadband is a component of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that is being negotiated.
The quality of of the internet service people ultimately get will be important, Pinnell said.
State leaders are getting calls every day from providers who want to do things like park trucks with mobile towers mounted on them in rural areas to provide service, he said. But that's not a permanent solution. That’s the kind of thing you do to provide emergency service after a natural disaster.
Pinnell said organizations like CEC that plan to leverage their existing infrastructure to deliver fiber internet to the home provide a better and more permanent solution.
CEC has already begun offering fiber internet to its members across a broad swath of the southwestern quadrant of Payne County through Centranet, a subsidiary.
Centranet has plans to offer the same service to surrounding small towns. The organization is applying for up to $30 million in federal funding to extend service to other areas.
© 2021 the Stillwater NewsPress (Stillwater, Okla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
