What is underway today in providing high-speed internet service throughout Oklahoma “rivals the importance of rural electrification in the 1930s and construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s,” said Mike Sanders, executive director of the Oklahoma Broadband Office.
“This is infrastructure for the information age – and small-town Oklahoma is at the heart of it.”
Literally hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans still don’t have high-speed internet service – “and 19 out of 20 of them live outside the urban cores of Oklahoma City and Tulsa,” Sanders told members of the Oklahoma Press Association on June 7 during their annual convention.
The digital divide is “a rural crisis, and closing it is no longer optional.”
At the Oklahoma Broadband Office (OBO), “Our mission is clear: to deliver fast, reliable and affordable internet to every corner of the state, especially the small towns and rural communities that have been left behind for far too long.”
Companies and individuals in the business “talk about internet access in terms of unserved and underserved,” Sanders said. ‘Unserved’ means a household “doesn’t even have a connection that provides a basic 25 megabits per second download and 3 megabits per second upload.”
‘Underserved’ means their connection is below the modern standard of 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second upload, he said. For the “average” household, a 100/20 Mbps connection is considered adequate.
According to the latest Federal Communications Commission national broadband map, Oklahoma ranks fourth in the U.S. for reducing the number of homes and businesses without access to high-speed internet, Sanders said. “In just six months, more than 58,000 locations have moved off the ‘unserved’ list.”
The momentum is due largely to “targeted grant programs our office has launched in partnership with the federal government and local internet service providers.”
Sanders’ office has already awarded more than $520 million in broadband expansion funding, “and when you include matching funds from the companies awarded the grants, the total jumps to more than $880 million.”
That money is being “put to work through more than 180 broadband projects, most of which are in rural counties,” he said.
For example, in the Stephens County town of Velma, 307 of 326 homes and business “are slated to receive broadband: 94% coverage.”
In Keota in Haskell County, “it’s even higher: 98% of locations are expected to be served.” Other towns expected to become “fully connected” include Hobart, Burns Flat, Coyle, Slick, Vera and Crowder, he said.
“When these projects are complete, nearly 150,000 Oklahomans – most of them in small towns – will gain high-speed internet for the first time.”
Some of those grants were awarded to companies owned by the Hilliary family in southwest Oklahoma, which owns and publishes Southwest Ledger.
The Broadband Governing Board awarded $53.4 million in federal grants in May to five internet service providers for 19 middle-mile infrastructure projects. When matching funds from the providers are included, the total investment is almost $90 million, Sanders said.
(Middle mile is the network that connects major internet hubs to local networks. “It’s much like a highway system for the internet,” Sanders said. “It gets the internet close enough so local providers can finish the last-mile connections to neighborhoods.”) “Later this year we plan to award more than $768 million from the BEAD program, our largest yet,” Sanders said. “That means even more towns, homes, farms, and
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