Kelly Kenoyer
More than at any other time in this nation’s history, a good internet connection is vital for a student’s education.
With no end in sight to the COVID lockdowns, it’s evident that students will continue to attend school virtually — and that creates a problem for students whose families can’t afford a connection, or who live too far out in the country to get quality internet.
According to the website BroadbandNow, approximately 4,000 people in Linn County don’t have access to any wired internet, and 18,000 don’t have fast enough internet to qualify as Broadband. Pew Research found in 2019 that rural Americans are 12 percent less likely to have home broadband than the average American: a gap that has persisted for more than a decade.
It’s not just about accessibility: it’s also about price. Wiring up fiber-optic cables is expensive, and denser urban areas give internet providers more return on investment for each yard of wiring placed. The same goes for a tower: the more people it serves, the more the cost of the installation can be spread among customers.
BroadbandNow found that “Zip codes in the bottom 10 percent of population density pay up to 37 percent more on average for residential wired broadband than those in the top 10 percent.”
The combination of low- or no-access to internet and high cost is a major problem now that Sweet Home School District has to rely on the internet connections of individual households to educate children.
“There’s been a lot of ‘we had internet, but we can’t afford it anymore,’” said Colleen Henry, Director of Instructional Technology for the Sweet Home School District. “Families would either double up or share access to hotspots. It became unsustainable because a parent is out of work and doesn’t have funds to provide internet anymore.”
Henry said the district is providing information to struggling families about low-cost internet programs, such as Oregon Lifeline and Comcast’s Internet Essentials program. But those options are only available if companies actually serve the homes with students in need of internet.
Comcast External Communications Director Amy Keiter said the company donated $1,000 to the Sweet Home Library to upgrade public access computers and provide books for the summer reading program.
“Comcast has invested approximately $1.3 billion in Oregon technology and infrastructure since 2011,” she said, though she was unable to provide information about exactly which counties received those investments.
“It can be more costly to build out an infrastructure network in less dense/more rural areas and a variety of factors impact where Comcast is able to extend its services,” she said.
CenturyLink also serves some customers in the Sweet Home area, but the connection quality varies significantly. Jaime Lynn Griffin has a CenturyLink connection where she lives on Liberty Road off highway 20, but the company only offers an 8 Mbps internet speed. For her family, which has four teenagers in the Sweet Home school district trying to connect to Zoom simultaneously, that connection doesn’t cut it.
“It’s a lot of lagging. It cuts out all the time,” she said. “They just close their Chromebooks and say ‘I’m done,’” she said.
It can be particularly frustrating because the Zoom classes count for half a day’s attendance, and there are Zooms every day. Her kids also have to do a survey every day to get counted for attendance, too.
Griffin worries about her kids getting the credits they need to graduate under these circumstances. While some of them can get two hours of limited in-person instruction each day, she said “three out of four” miss the connection of their friends, while the fourth is so frustrated he just wants to get a GED instead.
Griffin said she just wants to have her kids attend school in person, because the only way online classes could work better is if they had a better connection. Right now, that’s just not an option where they live.
“The mountains might be in our way of getting a solid speed connection,” she said. “We just live right in the ‘no’ zone.”
Locally owned companies are investing in rural areas, so people like Griffin may soon be able to choose from multiple providers.
Corvallis-based Peak Internet, which serves the east Linn County area, received some grant money because of COVID to increase internet access in rural areas, with the specific goal of reaching school-aged children. The Oregon Legislature appropriated $10 million in CARES funding to the grant program to increase broadband internet capacity in the state.
Peak Internet CEO Rick Peterson said his company was awarded $1.2 million, and that the total project totals nearly $2 million. The first round of construction served 354 students’ homes, he said, and further rounds will serve 1,100 more student households from a variety of school districts.
“These will be speeds up to a gigabit,” he said, which is equivalent to 940 Mbps.
The fiber internet expansion is aimed at homes particularly in rural Lebanon, he said, particularly around Berlin Road, McComb, Middle Ridge, Golden Valley, Hidden Valley, Blueberry Hill, Butte Creek and Mount Pleasant, among others. Peterson said those are areas where his company isn’t fighting with larger corporations for customers, because “they don’t have an interest.”
“We’ve been working very hard this last quarter to get as much completed as we can in that project,” Peterson said. It’s particularly challenging to do so quickly because of supply chain problems because of the company’s small scale, as well as delays because of forest fires.
“But we’re really happy that we’ve been able to benefit and help several people get connected,” he said.
Peterson, echoing Henry, added that he’s seen “clusters” of students coming to a household that has fiber internet to get access.
Beyond the expense required to install fiber optic cable, it is possible to receive broadband from a tower.
“But it really is line-of-sight,” Peterson said, so the connection can vary with the foliage on the trees, or can be disrupted if a new building is put up between one’s home and the tower. In an area full of timber land, towers can become obscured over time just from regular growth. And the rugged geography of this part of Oregon can also cause obstructions, with the hills themselves blocking the view.
“If you’re in Iowa and you put up a 200 [foot] tower, you can serve everybody,” Peterson said. “Here, it’s really about 40% of the households you can serve, and the other ones are really tough.”
The tower that serves his Crawfordsville home runs into similar problems, he said: He has direct line of sight on it, but trees grew up around it and his signal began to be impeded.
“We were fortunate to find the trees got to a point of harvest and maturity, and they logged off a section and then it took that obstruction away,” he said.
Another local company serving the Sweet Home area is Alyrica, and some of its new projects may help more Sweet Home students. Alyrica is putting up new towers in the Holley area this year, and plans for another tower out in Foster in 2021.
Sales Manager Jason Richards said the Holley project came from a CARES grant of about $187,000, though the planned Foster project will be fully funded by the company alone. Holley’s new tower will serve 1,200 people, he said.
The company is also working on a fiber expansion in Brownsville, and all of those projects will have connection speeds of 50 Megabits down and 10 up, he said, which is plenty for a Zoom call.
“We’ve got another project out in the Lacomb area that is in the works for 2021,” he said. “That one is going to hit not as many residents, but it is in a very badly needed area.”
Current internet speeds out there are just 700K, he said, which is slow even for opening emails with pictures in them, let alone not close to the speed required for Zoom calls.
Richards added that the company is always on the lookout for good areas to expand in, so those who need better internet access should call and express interest in a tower going up near their homes.
If the cost of internet is the problem more than availability, families can receive low-cost internet access through a Federal Communications Commission program called Lifeline, which helps discount broadband connections for families in need.
The Sweet Home School District is also providing WiFi hotspots for families, and students can connect at any school building from the parking lot for the duration of the pandemic.