The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Joe Coldebella:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Broadband Bunch. We are in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the NTCA SRC Live or Smart Rural Communities Event. I’m your host, Joe Coldebella, and I am joined by Josh Seideman, VP of Policy and Industry Innovation. Josh, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.
Josh Seideman:
Thank you.
Joe Coldebella:
This was a great event. We’re actually the last two here, so we’re sort of closing down the bar. I would love it if you could just give our listeners a little background on yourself.
Josh Seideman:
That’s a very big question. Alright. Well, you already said my title is VP of Policy and Industry Innovation for NTCA, the Rural Broadband Association. NTCA represents about 800 small, locally operated broadband providers throughout the United States. And what I do at NTCA is probably split 50-50 between nuts-and-bolts regulatory issues with the Federal Communications Commission, USDA, NTIA, Federal Trade Commission from time to time, and other federal agencies. And the other 50% is fun. That’s programming that gets back to the Smart Rural Community Program. That is everything from looking at where the innovations and trends are in IoT for agriculture or healthcare, population data, and rural youth retention. All of the issues that are bound up by that common fiber of broadband.
Joe Coldebella:
So obviously you have the 850, and then you’ve got a smaller subset of the smart rural communities. I was wondering if you could sort of just unpack that in terms of what a smart rural community is and how you become one. What are the different things that that need to be, sort of, milestones that they would need to reach?
Josh Seideman:
So our traditional broadband provider members are eligible to apply to become a Designated Smart Rural Community Provider. And we also have Smart Connected Community and Smart Tribal Community. Depending on the particular market that that company serves, it can select whether it wants to be a Smart Rural Community, a Connected, or a Tribal Community. But the criteria are very simple. There is a metric of broadband deployment that they must have in their community in terms of how many of their customers they can reach with a hundred megabits of service. They must have a certain number and certain percentage of their customers taking broadband service. Then we call the SRC pledge, which is where they sign on the dotted line and commit to collaborate actively with other community leaders, whether that be their schools, their healthcare organizations, law enforcement, or public officials.
And we sometimes get questions from companies, you know, “We can check the box. We’ve got a hundred megabits of broadband service. We have X percentage of our customers taking broadband, but what do you mean by that sort of active engagement in collaboration?”
And 99.9% of the time, the answer is, “You’re already doing it. I know you are because you’re meeting regularly with your school superintendent to ask about technology needs and how you can help meet those or help them find a pain point and tell them that maybe you’ve got a tech solution that can help you overcome that.”
Joe Coldebella:
You know, collaboration is so important because when you get the community to buy in, they understand the importance of broadband. It just makes the process a whole lot easier for these companies.
Josh Seideman:
Right.
Joe Coldebella:
So this is the second year you started at this show. It seems like you guys are really cooking with gasoline. I forget how many in the first year, but you’ve grown to over 270 partners, is that correct?
Josh Seideman:
Yeah.
Joe Coldebella:
What’s been the feedback here at the event in terms of the different events or the different panels that you’ve been putting on?
Josh Seideman:
It’s been positive. I think the most heartening feedback we get is when someone comes over to us and says, you know, “You raised an issue that I hadn’t thought about before, but I’m going to take that back to my local community.” And we talk very broadly in terms of broadband supporting healthcare and education and commercial development or economic development.
And I know we’re going to get into a conversation a little bit later, but when you unpack that public health and safety and telehealth and you start to peel back some layers and say, “All right, specifically how do we use broadband to address SUD disorders and treatment within the local judiciary at the county level?” That’s a critical question, and it’s not one that always comes top of mind. But if we have a couple hundred people at this meeting, and they walk home back to their communities and say, “Hey, we heard something really interesting that’s going on in a rural county in Ohio. How can we model that sort of program here?”
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, that’s a great point. The great thing about this is that there’s no one competing against one another. So people are so open with their ideas. They’re interested in collaborating and sharing. And I think it’s really an invaluable opportunity for folks to get a peek under the tent to see what other folks are doing, whatever the category.
Josh Seideman:
You hit the nail on the head of one of the things that we try to do with the Smart Communities Program, and that is to really coax these stories out of our members to find out what they’re doing in their communities and to elevate those best practices. Now, if you’ve seen one rural place, you’ve seen one rural place. So we can’t necessarily transfer what worked for one community over to another community. So we’re not talking about blueprints; we’re talking about frameworks. What’s the analytical construct that I can come away from a meeting like this and learn, well, this community engaged that sort of a program with its school? I’ve got a different problem, but I can take what they did, and I can adapt that to my particular needs.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. I think Pablo Picasso said that great artists don’t copy; they steal. So when you see that there’s an opportunity here, and you take what they’ve done. And then you make it work for you. One of the other things that I thought was great was that you are encouraging these folks to tell their stories. I was sitting at a table, and it’s interesting how when these were only telephone companies, there was no competition. And that now it’s like, “Hey, listen, we need to tell our story. We can’t assume that people know that we bring broadband.” And the great thing about these communities is when they’re fiber-based and controlled by local communities, the service is just that much better.
Josh Seideman:
So a recurring issue, so to speak, that we see among our companies is that they’re reluctant to boast. And they don’t even view themselves as doing anything that they should be bragging about. For them, this is just the normal and ordinary course of business. And we see it in the awards programs. We, you know, have companies who come in, and we know they’re doing terrific things. And they submit an application, and we say, “But wait a minute. You didn’t tell us about 50% of what you’re doing in your community.”
And they say, “Well, that’s really the customers doing it. We just kind of got them set up and pointed the way.”
Joe Coldebella:
You’re a hundred percent right. And it’s a very like, small town kind of thing. It’s like they tend to be modest, but it’s like, “Listen, you need to stand from the highest peak and scream, ‘We’re doing great things.’”
Josh Seideman:
There’s critical importance to that. There is a tendency sometimes, I think, among policymakers to think about broadband deployment in terms of, “How many facilities did you serve? And how many locations have you reached? How many miles of network did you deploy?” And those are all very important metrics. Those are really the metrics by which we can measure accountability when we’re talking about federal funding programs like BEAD or others. But the true return on investment, the true ROI for rural broadband is every student that’s able to enjoy more educational opportunities in a small town, in a small high school. It’s every patient that has better health outcomes. It’s every worker that has greater flexibility and more opportunity than they would if they didn’t have the connectivity to the outside world.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s another great point. When we saw Kathryn de Wit speak yesterday, she spoke about how important it is when you vest $1, you get $4 back. So it’s one of those things where there is definitely a halo effect. So it is not just, you know, in terms of getting connected, but from all the different things that you can bring to the community.
Josh Seideman:
Right. And we see that in economics all the time. There’s the investment multiplier, but broadband really sits at the base of so many different industries. And the many efforts that we’re engaging in terms of workforce development at the post-secondary level. We’ve worked with the National Rural Education Association to create a toolkit for K through 12 schools. And the goal of that is to raise awareness of careers in the broadband industry among younger students.
One of the messages that we deliver in that effort is that a career in broadband is not necessarily limited to installation technician repairs within that broadband company. And those are great jobs, and those are foundational career opportunities. But it involves everything from cybersecurity to supporting telehealth systems to supporting social services. And the more that broadband touches more of what we do on a regular daily basis that expands the universe of jobs that are available within the broadband industry.
Joe Coldebella:
You know, you raised another great point. Sitting in the talk that you were in yesterday about ag culture, it’s important to go towards the students and reach out to their four H clubs to the Young Farmers of America to show them. If you want to pursue these fields, you’ve got to make sure that technology is a part of it.
Josh Seideman:
Right. And its agriculture, manufacturing, it’s, and any venture really within the industrial sector, and it gets broken down as simply as the things that we are using on a daily basis in our consumer lives are becoming more and more complicated. So the process of creating, designing, building, repairing, and maintaining them is becoming more and more complicated.
Joe Coldebella:
And it’s becoming more and more broadband-focused, right? It’s one of those things where broadband is the back of the house. Nobody talks about it, but it’s got to be there. Otherwise, when you bring out the food, if it’s not right, people are going to complain.
Josh Seideman:
Right. Absolutely.
Joe Coldebella:
So I would love it if we could touch on some of the different breakout sessions that you guys created. I think you did a phenomenal job. One of the presenters that I had a chance to interview, Gary Johnson from Paul Bunyan, they’re doing tons of stuff with gaming. And it’s amazing because I think it’s marketing 2.0. It’s a way to bring broadband to folks in a way that gets them excited, but they don’t know they’re being sold.
Josh Seideman:
Right. And especially for younger students, we encounter something called the relevance gap. We’ve probably all hit this in our lives in school where we are engaged in the subject, and a teacher is droning on and on. And we think to ourselves, what relevance does this have to my life? When am I going to use trigonometry? When will this war from the 1700s ever have an impact on my life?
Broadband is remarkable because, again, it touches so many aspects of daily living. So when we talk about the relevance gap in terms of associating academic coursework with what people do on an everyday basis, gaming is an opportunity for not just the technical skills in terms of computing and coding and all the avenues that people can go through as their playing or modification, but it’s also soft skill building in terms of teamwork and camaraderie. That’s the talent pipeline development aspect that we look for.
But there’s a huge social component for gaming as well. Again, this is not the bread and butter of what NTCA gets into as a broadband association. But to the extent that what our members do touches people’s lives in ways that couldn’t be reached without broadband, it provides kids an opportunity to meet others and work with others with whom they might not have gravitated to at the cafeteria table.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, it’s a way to learn that isn’t so regimented. It’s interesting when we talk with folks in terms of adoption and the sooner you start the easier folks are going to embrace tech because as we move forward, as we become more part of a digital economy, you must have those skills.
Josh Seideman:
Well, as human beings, how do we learn? By doing and by playing. That’s how children learn by play.
Joe Coldebella:
Great point. You were part of a panel for Ag-Tech. I am super fascinated by how much broadband really is involved in the entire process for farms in terms of cattle. You said something yesterday in your talk about ag terrorism, and I just was blown away. That is something I never even thought of.
Josh Seideman:
So getting to the first issue, think of farming as a business of logistics. It’s getting the seed into the ground at the right time. It’s making sure you have the right chemical application or the right irrigation. You want to make sure that you harvest it at the right time. If you’re talking about animal farming, the two biggest cost inputs are going to be feed and disease. You want to make sure that you trace the ownership of a head of cattle, for example, from birth to processing. So all of these are steps along the way, whether it’s plant or animal farming, that speaks to the ultimate value of the product. And all of them are increasingly being addressed through broadband-enabled solutions.
Now, let’s hop over to agro-terrorism. Agriculture faces no less threat from cybersecurity intrusions than any other industry. The consequences can be devastating. Now, we often look back to the meatpacking hack from a couple of summers ago, but that gets into a transactional issue in some respect. But if we take a look at irrigation, feed management, and disease control, adversarial intervention could interfere with irrigation and ruin a crop. It could message a farmer that a substantial proportion of the herd is sick and needs to be separated and needs to be put down. It can be overfeeding, or underfeeding through these automated bins and can have devastating impacts on the nation’s food supply. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be simple mischief, doesn’t have to be state-sponsored terrorism, but again, whatever the source.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, right. And one of the panelists said that cattle wrestling is still a thing. And if you have broadband connectivity, you can have cameras set up so you can cut that off, which is amazing.
Switching channels a little bit to telehealth. It’s an important use case to make sure that folks understand how important it is. It’s just another way to bring technology closer to rural folks. They say for every 10 miles someone is from a hospital, the less likely it is that they’ll go in for care. And if they could access telehealth, they could at least have a preliminary sort of discussion with a healthcare provider.
Josh Seideman:
Right. So number one, it works on the front end, just like that. It also works on the back end. There are a number of times when people have to go in for a post-surgical consult. And if you’re miles away from that specialist, you might be driving a couple of hours to get there. You might be driving an hour to get there, and you might be an hour in the waiting room. And often these post-surgical consults can be done through a video transmission. The other neat thing, and again, this gets into the connectivity and the higher bandwidth capacities and needs is the developing field of using virtual reality and alternative reality for telehealth and specifically for mental health therapy and treatment.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. We did an interview last year with some folks who are doing some really interesting stuff with cancer treatments with the University of Kansas and partnering with rural hospitals. So if someone needs to get diagnosed by a specialist, they can put on the VR goggles. Then it gives the opportunity to get a world-class surgeon or doctor to look at their case, which is amazing.
Josh Seideman:
Absolutely.
Joe Coldebella:
In of inclusion, what are some of the things that we can do to get adoption up, especially in terms of the folks that feel as though the internet has passed them by?
Josh Seideman:
I mean, the biggest barriers to broadband adoption are income and educational attainment. The two are linked a little bit because numerous studies demonstrate that the higher the level of education someone has the higher their income level is. So we can put educational attainment off to the side as being a predictor cause. However, income and affordability continue to be the prevailing issue as we have various government programs that are aimed at easing broadband subscription rates for low-income users. Then the next question is, how do companies create outreach opportunities to other organizations within their community that can reach specific populations or communities that have not yet become deeply engaged in broadband?
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. There’s a huge intimidation factor as well. If you didn’t learn when you were younger, then if you put in a dot incorrectly or miss a slash, it just gets frustrating.
Josh Seideman:
So, you know, age is another factor in broadband adoption. I think that will self-resolve over time because I don’t know that as you and I get older, we’re going to throw away our phones or our devices. However, there will be new applications technology coming on board. So I think that there is value to thinking programmatically into the future of what protocols we use and what sort of programming can we develop to make sure that people, no matter how old they are, always have access and opportunity to test drive the new technology.
Joe Coldebella:
You know, I was at a conference in Wilson, North Carolina, and I was speaking with someone who was trying to bring folks together in terms of inclusion. And she went into a retirement community, and the folks were very hesitant. But what she did was she introduced them to YouTube. And as we all know, YouTube is just chock full of snapshots of the past. So she said it was terrific having these folks hop on and find things that they remembered as a kid that made them excited to go on the internet. And I think that it is really important to find those things that get people excited and engaged. It’s not just a tool; it’s an opportunity.
Josh Seideman:
That’s a terrific example. And there are a number of companies, but one that comes to mind is they’re using virtual reality. They’re piloting programs in nursing homes where they are working specifically with Alzheimer’s patients and other patients with that sort of decline. And they are jogging the memory and stimulating intellectual engagement by taking them on a tour of their past through virtual reality. And then that opens the person up to talk about things that they might not have been able to access otherwise.
Joe Coldebella:
I saw something similar for physical therapy where they had older folks who were bedridden. They put virtual reality goggles on them, and they were allowed to exercise. And it was a much more engaging opportunity for them. It wasn’t them just raising their hand or throwing a ball, but they were in these virtual worlds. So it’s amazing how in the next, you know, five to 10 years what we’re going to do in terms of getting folks excited to do whatever it is they want to do.
Josh Seideman:
It’s also used for phobia treatment. One method of treating certain phobias is to bring the person progressively closer to that which he or she fears. If a person has a fear of heights, a fear of spiders, in virtual reality, you can bring them closer and closer without invoking any actual danger.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, I have never heard that before, but that is just phenomenal because it’s true. When I would share my Oculus goggles with friends, as soon as they would put them on, they’re like, “I’ve got to get this.” It’s crazy how amazing and how real it really is.
As we wind up here, you did a panel today called “We Measure What We Treasure”. Can you share with the audience the idea behind that? I thought the two professors that you had were tremendous in the sense of sharing with everyone the importance of connectivity, especially in rural areas.
Josh Seideman:
The things that we don’t care about we don’t bother to measure. We don’t measure how many hefty bags we took out during a week. One of the approaches that we take in the Smart Communities program is a construct that I call “numbers and narrative”. The stories stick. And we know that because that’s what resonates with us as human beings. We’re storytellers.
Policymakers — I’m not saying that policymakers aren’t human — are affected by stories. But in order to make a rational decision that withstands testing, good policymakers want to rely on numbers as well. So when we’re talking about the impact of broadband, and we can talk in high platitudes of qualitative terms, terms of the students who can access more educational opportunities, the workers who have more options, and the healthcare patients who have better outcomes.
But we can measure those outcomes in healthcare. We can measure the value of broadband on such things as real estate values, labor force participation, or economic activity in a community. So when we can blend those numbers, those tested and studied data-driven outcomes, and put those up against the stories that resonate within us as human beings, I think we have really a solid basis upon which to base very important federal and national policies.
Joe Coldebella:
I couldn’t agree more. You summed it up perfectly. It’s really a balance. It’s about telling stories, but it’s also having concrete data points that sort of reinforce it. You could tell a story, and then people say, “Oh, that’s not true.” Well, in fact, there’s a ton of stuff to back it up. So that is really important. I thought they did an awesome job of just sharing opportunities for remote workers in rural communities with the audience. There are all these different ways that these communities can use the internet to not only make their communities survive but thrive.
Josh Seideman:
Right. I went to law school, so my entire professional existence very often depends upon the footnotes that I can cite to back up my position. I never want to be in a congressional office, Federal Communications Commission meeting, or anywhere where I pitch a story and somebody looks at me and says, prove it. And the numbers and narrative approach enables us to tell a story that resonates. It enables us to say, “It’s true. And here’s the evidence.”
Joe Coldebella:
You know what, Josh, that’s a great place to end it. I want to thank you and all the folks with NTCA. You guys do a phenomenal job. You were so welcoming. I really appreciate your time and giving us the opportunity to tell folks stories.
Josh Seideman:
Thanks very much.
Joe Coldebella:
All right. That’s going to wrap up this episode of The Broadband Bunch. Until next time, we’ll see you guys later.
