The Need for Speed

The Need for Speed

TODD MAIN | ISA DIRECTOR OF MARKET DEVELOPMENT | ILLINOIS SOYBEAN ASSOCIATION

Access to reliable broadband service in rural Illinois is an ongoing issue. While it has been discussed for a long time, there has been little to no progress that will benefit our communities. Illinois Soybean Association (ISA) Director Scott Gaffner knows first-hand about the challenges poor quality internet pose in running a farm and business in rural Illinois. To solve this problem in his family's century-old farming community in Bond County, he started his own small internet provider.

Gaffner says, “Allow me to ride the coattails of Tom Cruise when he first found his desire in 1986 while filming Top Gun and said, ‘I feel the need, the need for speed.’ Our goal at the Illinois Soybean Association is to identify and help counties deliver the needed internet speed to the 43,000 soybean farmers in rural Illinois to continue to provide a blockbuster crop.”

Scott understood that the challenge was larger than just his county and is one faced by communities across our state. He reached out to his fellow ISA board members and organized an initiative to look at the issue from a no-nonsense, practical farmer perspective.

As the ISA board and staff began to look at the issue of rural broadband, a couple of things became clear and helped to explain why so little progress was made in getting quality broadband in rural Illinois. The first of these roadblocks were in the nature of the way the discussion was being framed by big internet service providers. When policy discussions on rural broadband access were held, a common refrain was, “Well 95 percent of the population has good service and often has two or more providers to choose from, so this is a really small problem”.

The other roadblock to progress was the fact that the broadband service maps produced by the FCC were problematic and failed to reflect the experience Illinois rural communities face daily with inadequate internet service.

One other interesting thing we uncovered in our review of the state of the rural broadband policy discussion is that the current business models of the internet service providers are dependent on subscriptions that in turn are dependent on population density. This means that recovering the investments in providing service precludes providing service in the lower populated areas of rural Illinois. So, unless we broadened the discussion and expanded the metrics used to make decisions about where to provide service, we were never going to get quality broadband service in our communities.

As we started thinking about how to broaden this discussion, several things came into focus:

1. Agricultural production is on the verge of a dramatic increase in productivity. Over the next decade, there is an expected 15-25 percent productivity increase with the adoption of precision agriculture equip- ment and practices, provided we can get good broadband in the field and on the farm.

2. Agriculture is the largest economic sector in Illinois, and we can calculate the economic impact of quality broadband investments with increases in productivity, which changes the conversation. It makes sense to invest in our number one economic sector.

3. Since building out rural broadband service will be predominately funded by public tax dollars from the state and federal government, rural communities should ensure that they get a fair slice of the pie with minimum speeds that allow for upstream as well as downstream data streaming.

4. Rural counties often lack the capacity to develop broadband plans and write the grants necessary to apply for funding. To impact this situation, we need to fill this capacity gap and reduce other barriers to successful applications.

To begin the process of widening broadband access, ISA collaborated with the Illinois State University GIS Department, Illinois Farm Bureau, Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, United Soybean Board, Illinois Broadband Lab, and Illinois Extension to bring broadband access to the pilot counties of McLean, Hancock, Edgar, Ogle, and Schuyler.

Enhancing broadband access in these five Illinois counties is just the beginning of the Broadband Breakthrough project. ISA and partners hope to gain relevant information from surveys, community liaisons, and local internet providers to eventually develop a proposal to ensure a share of $1 billion in federal funding to go toward broadband access in rural Illinois.

To learn more and to follow our progress, visit https://www.ilsoy. org/focus-areas/market-development/broadband/.