Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow coming to you today from the studios of Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. Later in the hour, a trip out to the giant gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. But first, time to check in on the state of science.

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IRA FLATOW: Local science stories of national importance. And us being at Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, chances are you use some of the internet services each day all over Texas. Maybe you get your entertainment there. You communicate with friends and family, use it to buy things. You know, it is an ever-growing part of people’s lives and businesses.

But here in Texas, where everything is bigger, almost 2 million people are without access to high speed internet. And the size and wide open spaces of the state can make wiring rural communities something of let’s call it a challenge. Joining me to talk about it is Paul Flahive, technology and entrepreneurship reporter at Texas Public Radio. He’s here with me in San Antonio.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Thanks for having us here today. It’s nice to be here. So OK, let’s talk about how big the digital divide is. What’s the population of Texas and how much– what percentage of those people?

PAUL FLAHIVE: Yeah. So it’s about 28 million people in Texas, and around 2 million are without internet access or access to high speed internet. And they estimate about 80% of those are in rural areas.

IRA FLATOW: Where would rural areas be in Texas, for example?

PAUL FLAHIVE: Oh, well–

IRA FLATOW: All over the place.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Really, all over the place. I mean, there’s some big hubs, like Dallas Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin. But all of West Texas, a lot of East Texas, once you get past Houston and north of Houston. So it’s a big swath of the state.

IRA FLATOW: So we might not really not know how many people the exact numbers are.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Yeah. Because of the way that the FCC collects data on who has access and who doesn’t, it’s ISP provided– so it’s the AT&Ts, the Verizons of the world tell us how many people they think have access. And it’s broken down by census blocks. So if one person in a census block has access, they say the whole census block has access.

So the estimates have been kind of widely discredited, and the FCC is trying to figure out a better way of collecting all that data. They just voted to change that last week.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. And of course, everybody’s trying to figure out a better way of getting internet service then–

PAUL FLAHIVE: Absolutely.

IRA FLATOW: –to the rural areas. What’s the problem? From an outsider’s point of view, why don’t you just string some more cable and get everybody covered?

PAUL FLAHIVE: Absolutely. Well, you know, we rely on for-profit companies to make those things happen. And the equation just doesn’t work out in a lot of these communities when you’re talking about a service that has a lot of a cost associated with dragging a fiber optic cable along these poles, the people that own– getting the permission of property owners, things like that. And then providing a service for maybe a handful of people just doesn’t add up.

IRA FLATOW: So it’s a question of money. It’s always a question of money, right?

PAUL FLAHIVE: Often it is, yes.

IRA FLATOW: Because everybody has this private land. The whole state is private lands and no room for public access ways.

PAUL FLAHIVE: That’s right. There’s a lot of– a lot of Texas is private and getting the permission to cross people’s land has just recently changed for some of these rural cooperatives, electric cooperatives, so that they can actually get permission. They can just send out a notice, hey, we’re doing this. And only if a landowner– a landowner who may or may not be in the state– opts in or opts out do they have to worry about it.

IRA FLATOW: OK. Let’s talk about what we like to talk about, the technology fix.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Sure.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s put a satellite up. Oh, let’s wait for 5G. Put more towers in.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Absolutely. I think 5G has been talked about a lot. But 5G, especially in rural areas, is a real big question mark because 5G has to be a lot more densely populated. And they all connect to something. They all connect to a fiber cable. And if there’s no fiber cable, then there’s no 5G.

For satellites, you’re talking about the SpaceXs and Amazons and OneWeb of the world. They collectively want to put up tens of thousands of these broadband satellites. It’s unclear how fast they’ll be. There are some satellite options now but they’re pretty slow. That’s the complaints anyway.

IRA FLATOW: In your series, you reported on how, in many ways, this is like the drive to rural electrification in years past. And they accomplished that with rural co-ops.

PAUL FLAHIVE: That’s right.

IRA FLATOW: Tell us about that.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Yeah. So I mean, now, 80 years ago, in the 1930s, the federal government decided that it wanted to invest in electrifying these communities to give them options for running water powered by powering pumps that can run water, electric stoves, things like that.

And they thought that that was a worthwhile thing. They put money into these cooperatives so that local communities could run their own systems and they would be responsible for kind of making sure they were maintained as well just keeping them running.

And it seemed to work. And now, you’ve got those same rural cooperatives formed with federal loan dollars reaching millions of homes with electricity are stepping in to take on broadband in Texas. So I think there’s four million broadband user– four million electric co-op customers. And about 30,000 of them right now– so less than 1%– are broadband. But it’s growing.

IRA FLATOW: And you spoke with the head of one of these– I have a clip here– of these rural cooperatives about why they do this.

WILLIAM HETHERINGTON: It’s not about making money. You’re not doing this to make money. You’re doing this to allow your communities to survive and to be here 20 years from now.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Absolutely. That was Bill Hetherington, CEO of Bandera Electric Cooperative just northwest of San Antonio. And that’s how they talk about this. This is not something that is optional. This is something that has to happen if these communities are going to survive.

IRA FLATOW: And from the quote you played, they do feel like community spirit. It is not a money issue with them. It is something that, the future of the country is heading this way. We have to help out.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s something that people have it’s kind of become this mission for a lot of people.

And when it is your– I mean, he lives there. This is his community. So that’s kind of the beauty of the co-op model, is that there’s an incentive for them to do it. But also, it has to be approved by members and customers. So they have to decide to go into that business.

IRA FLATOW: And you talked about how 80 years ago, the cooperatives were formed to put electricity in. Today, you would never argue– today but 80 years ago, you would never argue, hey, who needs electricity? But today, internet service is about as needed, or people depend upon it as much as electricity was.

PAUL FLAHIVE: I think we’re at a moment in time where the idea of Internet and high speed internet as a luxury is over. It’s changing. And I think in those communities, they are demanding it. You talk to local economic development people as well as just city council people, and they’re getting asked, where’s the internet?

IRA FLATOW: So is the state– the state of Texas– putting money into this. Is the federal government putting money into this?

PAUL FLAHIVE: The feds have a lot of money tied up in this. $20 billion I think they just passed over 10 years last week for the rural opportunity fund. And then the state of Texas is not currently funding it with any legislative or grant funds. There was just a session and they didn’t pass any bills that had any money attached, but there are a couple.

IRA FLATOW: But it would seem that in certain places you could not survive. I mean, physically and communally. Like, let’s say, for example, hospitals. Don’t hospitals have to be wired to the internet?

PAUL FLAHIVE: Yeah. There’s a big question right now about hospitals. And there are programs that specifically target libraries and schools and critical places like hospitals that try and get them funding so that it’ll bring down the cost of high speed internet to these places. But in Texas, I think we’ve lost about 23, 24 hospitals in just the last five years in rural communities, which is– often, the thing that they say is going to replace that when we talk about rural communities and aging in place is telehealth. But a lot of places don’t have the infrastructure.

IRA FLATOW: If you can’t get to your doctor or you live in a rural community, you may be able to send your symptoms in by telephone or by the internet. But if you don’t have that internet connection–

PAUL FLAHIVE: Yeah. If it’s not reliable– you know, in the course of doing some of this reporting, there was at least one couple in Corrigan, Texas I talked to that were lamenting just how unreliable their internet connection was and how even just a basic doctor’s appointment requires you to log in and write and sign up for a slot.

IRA FLATOW: You know, we’ve heard about the digital divide in the rest of the country between have and have not schools. So this would also be affecting schoolchildren learning how to become fluent in coding or the internet also. You’re going to have a section that cannot do that.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Absolutely. I don’t have any hard data on how that impacts them, but you do hear from basically every one– every one of the communities I’ve visited to talk about this, at least one person will bring up the fact that kids are hanging out in the parking lot of the library after it closes to get access to Wi-Fi. They’re going to McDonald’s not for the burgers but for the free Wi-Fi access.

IRA FLATOW: Is it becoming a political issue at all, or is it still something on the peripheral?

PAUL FLAHIVE: I mean, it’s hard to say if it’s becoming like a political issue. Obviously, it’s not something people are running on in Texas. But we just saw the Warren campaign publish a big broadband plan that allotted $85 billion in grants for this issue, as well as would preempt a lot of states laws that prevent them from having municipal broadband.

IRA FLATOW: So if you think that the Democrats may think that Texas is in play during this presidential election, they might come and use this as an issue.

PAUL FLAHIVE: It might be. I mean, I think having those conversations, with the Warren campaign being the first, it may very well be that they push a lot of other communities and other leaders to start introducing this kind of legislation.

IRA FLATOW: And as far as the long-term outlook, does anybody believe that sooner or later this is not going to come out to the rural neighborhoods?

PAUL FLAHIVE: I mean, it’s hard to say that it’s inevitable. I think there’s a lot of people working on it, and I think I’ve never kind of seen it get as talked about as it is now and just in the last 18 months. So I think we are at a special moment in time where everyone is sort of paying attention to this. And even banks have a stake in this with wanting to reduce their brick and mortar shops and being able to invest in these programs with the Federal Reserve CRA stuff.

So yeah, I think there’s a lot of interest. And it’s hard to say, though, whether or not it’s going to absolutely happen.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Do people say, hey, you know, you choose to live out there on the ranches and the far places. Heck with you.

PAUL FLAHIVE: I’m sure they do. And that’s one of the big things. That’s one of the big draws of living in these communities, is they don’t have some of these things that– the traffic and the things of the cities. But that’s what– we’re already at a point where these communities realize that people are passing on their towns– living in them, locating businesses in them– because they don’t have high speed internet.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. It’s quite interesting. Thank you for taking time to be with us. This is really interesting topic, Paul.

PAUL FLAHIVE: Thanks so much.

IRA FLATOW: Paul Flahive, technology and entrepreneurship reporter at Texas Public Radio.

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