What the Iowa Caucus means for getting Iowa online

Free Wi-Fi has been in place for a while, but starting this week, the library is lending out ten Sprint mobile hotspots in hardshell cases, prepped for students and residents who can’t count on connectivity otherwise.It’s one of the many creative ways local leaders in Winterset have worked to ensure every person in their community has reasonable access to the internet. It’s particularly a problem for rural communities, which are ten times more likely to lack broadband access.In Iowa, it’s been this way for years. Nearly all homes in the urban areas of the state have access to high-speed internet, but rural areas have been slow to catch up, largely because of the sheer expense of connecting them.“If we had the ability to serve sparsely populated areas with a decent return on investment, we would have all been hooked up already,” Dave Duncan, CEO of the Iowa Communications Alliance, tells The Verge. Campaigns have pledged tens of billions toward connecting rural America, but it’s still a secondary issue for the candidates, raising uncomfortable questions about how long towns like Winterset may have to wait to join the rest of the country online.Nine days before the caucuses, people were lined up in eighteen-degree weather outside the Ames City Auditorium to see Sanders with Michael Moore, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the band Portugal, the Man. For the Sanders supporters, the biggest applause lines were about health care. “We’d love to have a beautiful university building in a rural setting like Mitchell, but the problem is that you just can’t have the connectivity and the high-speed access to make it happen,” Derek Balsley tells The Verge. Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, one of the two Democratic FCC commissioners, dissented to the RDOF order, saying the current version excludes “any area that the Commission ‘know[s] to be awarded funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect Program or other similar federal or state broadband subsidy programs, or those subject to enforceable broadband deployment obligations.” At Thursday’s meeting, Chairman Ajit Pai said RDOF would ban big companies that already have buildout goals they promised to meet but never did, but the uncertainty puts smaller telecoms like Osage in a difficult spot.At the rallies and town halls, Democrats are promising that things will be different when they’re in charge, and most of what they’re promising is money. Sanders has pledged as much as $150 billion, as part of his Green New Deal plan, that would flow to “publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.” But like any campaign promise, it’s not clear how much of that money will get through Congress, and there’s a growing anxiety among experts that money alone isn’t enough.“You can’t just throw money at this,” Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, tells The Verge.