Lawmakers discuss rural internet in Monroe County

Sep. 4--Editor's note: This story is the first in a two-part series covering the state Senate Communications and Technology Committee's Sep. 3, 2019 public hearing at the Monroe County Safety Center. Follow the ongoing coverage in the Pocono Record or online at poconorecord.com.

SNYDERSVILLE -- State lawmakers convened a special hearing at the Monroe County Safety Center on Tuesday to discuss the state of high-speed internet access for rural Pennsylvanians. The state Senate Communications and Technology Committee's special meeting, held in the county Emergency Management office headquarters at the suggestion of Sen. Mario Scavello (R-40), brought together some of the region's biggest telecommunications service providers to testify alongside industry experts and top state agency officials.

"This time last year, the number we all were using with regard to the number of people who were without high-speed internet was about 800,000," said Chairwoman Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-28) of the Senate Communications and Technology Committee. "We now know, thanks to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, that only a small portion of Pennsylvania meets the Federal Communication Commission's minimum speed for broadband of 25.3 megabytes per second. The number of people without access who have a discrepancy in actual speeds versus advertised speeds, they believe, is in the millions."

"We all know that broadband is important for so many reasons, but we also know it can become a public safety concern if someone cannot access 911 services or a pacemaker can't sync with a physician's system," she added. "We must ensure that our residents that live in the most rural areas of the commonwealth have access to life-saving emergency response and healthcare, as well as access to high-speed broadband -- and that really is the first step to make that happen."

Here are some highlights from the afternoon's panel discussions:

Criag Eccher -- President/CEO, Tri-County Rural Electric Cooperative

Criag Eccher, president and CEO of the not-for-profit power provider Tri-County Rural Electric Cooperative, offered insight into the obstacles faced by regional electric co-op services looking to expand coverage. He also spoke of the potential benefits that electric service customers could see from regional broadband improvements.

"Chattanooga embarked on a project like this in 2012," Eccher said. "Since then, they've been able to reduce their outage hours per customer on the electric system by 50% -- they have the same amount of incidents that they would have had, same amount of outages, but their outage hours that their customers experience over the year is 50% less."

"That's tremendous. That's what this network can also allow us to provide to our membership."

Kevin Dellicker -- President/owner, Dellicker Strategies

Kevin Dellicker, president of technology consulting company Dellicker Strategies, has some recent experience with broadband improvements in the Poconos. Dellicker's business played a significant role in the Monroe Gigabit Project, a private sector initiative which in 2017 succeeded in bringing gigabit internet -- networks capable of downloading data at speeds of one billion bits per second -- to Monroe County.

"I think one of the main issues is the core problem of telecom economics, and if we don't address that issue first and foremost then I think any kind of proposal that we put in place is going to be doomed to fail," Delicker told the Senate committee. "What I mean by that is really very simple: it costs more to serve people in rural areas than it does in urban areas. It's simply a matter of fact that if you stretch out a piece of fiber in the city you can hit a lot of customers, and in the rural areas you can only hit very few. So, your return on investment is much, much lower the lower the population."

In the case of the Monroe Gigabit Project, Dellicker's preferred solution was demand aggregation, which he said is sometimes described as the "Walmart approach." The method involves organizing multiple buyers, usually large enterprise customers, into a purchasing consortium and connecting them with providers through a competitive procurement process.

Dellicker's assessment of other common approaches to the same problems fell far short of an endorsement.

"One of the top so-called solutions that I see proposed -- and honestly I've watched it battered around for almost two decades -- are these ideas of public benefit broadband projects," he said. "They have all sorts of different names, but they're characterized by two things: very, very extensive government involvement in the operation of telecom networks and often times actual government ownership or direct subsidies of these networks themselves."

"Quite frankly, I'm not aware of any of these types of projects across Pennsylvania that have met expectations, and there are very few around the country that I'm aware of that have really delivered on what they've promised. These projects tend to be based on this very tantalizing but, I think, very misguided notion that new public nonprofits can do a better job of delivering broadband access to underserved areas than established private companies that know the telecom business. Often this derives from a reactionary viewpoint that the private providers are some kind of enemy to the communities in which they operate."

"But, if experienced telecom providers can't deliver services despite the profit motive, inexperienced public officials are unlikely to do better out of the goodness of their hearts or the goading of their political bosses."

Dellicker further criticized programs that would directly subsidize private companies for service expansions.

"Often we see programs that grant millions and millions of dollars to private telecom companies to build new networks that these companies are going now own and operate themselves," he said. "Generally, giving taxpayer money to private companies so that they can earn profits is a bad idea. That's why it gets these derogatory names like corporate welfare, but it seems that in the telecom space we don't seem to view it the same way. Giving public money to telecom companies -- often to undercut their privately funded rivals -- seems to happen quite often."

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