Rural Broadband Association's mission to close the digital divide - ETI
X

Want to take a Self-Guided tour?




July 28, 2022

Rural Broadband Association’s mission to close the digital divide

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. Welcome to another episode of the Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella. We are at SRC Live. This event is hosted by the NTCA, the Rural Broadband Association. Joining me is the CEO of NTCA, Shirley Bloomfield. Shirley, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Thank you, Joe. It’s a delight to be here with you today.

Joe Coldebella:

I got to say that it’s been awesome being here. You’ve really put on an incredible event. You should really be proud of what you and your team have done. It’s fantastic.

Shirley Bloomfield:

I so appreciate that because honestly, when you sit in a room and you start planning this and you have this vision of like, we want to get all these people together, the ISPs, the rural community leaders, the folks who are doing some of the things on the ground in terms of services that are driven by broadband and get everybody talking. Honestly, just being here, the energy level is exactly what we’d hoped for.

Joe Coldebella:

Yeah, it’s absolutely fantastic. Before we dive into the event, I would love it if you could give our listeners a little bit of background on yourself and just a little bit of your origin story.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely. I actually did the classic I’m going to move out to Washington DC and change the world after I graduated from college. Who doesn’t? I worked up on Capital Hills. My background was very focused in on the budget committee and dealing with some of those funding programs. I wound up heading over to NTCA, which was then the National Telephone Association, which shows you how long ago that was, and wound up being an advocate in their lobbying shop and spent 20 years with the association and had a great opportunity to run in numerous divisions, lead their advocacy, but then I had the opportunity.

I was recruited by Quest to go and run their federal operation right before the conventions in 2008. It was such a great opportunity for me to actually go off and see how the bigger carriers do things. I had spent so much time working with small telephone companies. That was really eye-opening for me on a number of levels. Then moved to Verizon where I also worked in their advocacy shop. The position to come back to NTCA as the CEO opened up about 12 years ago. I think I called the recruiter before the position was posted and said, “That’s my job. Those are my guys. I got to come back here.”

Rural Broadband service provider’s contribution to closing the digital divide

Joe Coldebella:

I love it. I love it. It’s funny that you talk about Quest, you talk about Verizon. If you ask most people that are probably not in the rural areas, if you say, “Hey, well, how many phone companies are there?” They’ll say three or four, but that’s not the case at all, is it?

Shirley Bloomfield:

Oh, absolutely not. Actually, the industry has consolidated a little bit, but for example, at NTCA, we represent 850 community-based providers. These are the folks who actually provided telephone service years ago in these communities that the Bell companies didn’t want to go to. You know what, honestly, for good reason. They’re very high cost, very low density, and very rural. When you’re a large nationwide corporation or even a regional corporation, you’ve got to make a decision based on what your ROI is, and what your shareholders are thinking.

Joe Coldebella:

Absolutely.

Shirley Bloomfield:

You’re not going into those markets. My companies are the guys that literally, a hundred years ago, 75 years ago, said you know what, if we don’t do it, nobody else is going to come here to provide the service, and then watching them do this evolution into broadband providers, probably sooner than many of the national providers, because bridging the distance and the handicap of living in a rural community, those communication tools are even more critical.

Shirley Bloomfield:

For example, we’ve got 850 carriers. They are about five or 6% of the population of the United States who they service, but they’re 35% of the land mass. When you look at a map of the United States, and that’s their island territory, they’ve now spread because they’ve become silos. They’ve edged out over the course of the last several years into those underserved communities that are neighboring them, but they are the rural parts of this country that a lot of folks like to refer to as flyover, or everybody needs to take a step into some of these communities.

Joe Coldebella:

Absolutely. It’s one of those things where you took the CEO role in 2010, and that was a major inflection point in terms of just the evolution of the transition from copper, from being about the phone and the evolution into broadband. I was wondering if you could talk about how it’s been these last 12 years in terms of… It’s been really boring, right? Nothing really exciting had been happening.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Nothing. It has been so dull and so slow-paced. I actually wound up coming in right after the release of the national broadband plan that had been put out by LCC. I would’ve liked to have been there a little bit sooner, so we could have maybe influenced a little bit of the tone of that national broadband plan, to have been a little bit more cognizant of the fact that there are these community-based providers and that the solution for bridging the digital divide, even at that point in time, was not about necessarily relying on the large carriers, and at least recognizing the role that these community-based providers play.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Coming in at that time, really hitting the ground, making sure we were working with policymakers, to educate them. Who are these community-based providers? What are they doing? Why are they leading in innovation? Why are they leading in technology? Why are they full-service providers when a lot of the other providers at that time were not? My guys were already telephone companies, and video service providers and a number of them were doing wireless. On top of that, early adopters into the broadband market, because they could see what broadband would bring to a rural community. If you didn’t have access to an economic market, your ranchers didn’t have access to being able to do online livestock auctions. What did that mean for the future of their rural communities? Yeah, a lot of stuff.

Joe Coldebella:

I also think that the fact that these are rural, they’re neighbors, they see them at the bank, they see them at the store. There’s definitely proximity. There’s also accountability.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Oh, unbelievably. It never ceases to amaze me. First of all, when I go out and visit my member companies, they all have payment offices. The number of people in the community who will actually come to the company to pay their monthly bills, look at services, and chat with JoEllen at the front desk, is a really different cultural experience. You’re absolutely right. The first thing people will say is, particularly when they evolve to broadband services… It’s one thing when your telephone goes out, but holy cow, your internet goes down, you’re going to hear about it because they know where you live. They know where you shop. Their kids go to school with your kids. You’re going to see them on the back-to-school night. It is a really different sense of accountability in terms of the services you provide. If there’s one thing I would say that really differentiates these providers, it is that level of customer service. Part of it is because they have to, and second of all because they really care. If they don’t do it, nobody else is stepping into that void.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s absolutely fantastic. It really is important. As you opened the conference, you said something that I really appreciated. I think that was a great jumping-off point. You said, “This is a broadband moment.” Could you speak to that? Because I think that the evolution is right here and it’s like a broadband moment. Could you please speak to that?

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely. When I look at where we are today as a country and where we are as an industry, if there’s a silver lining on a pandemic, if you can actually call a silver lining anywhere in there, it was… I felt like everybody finally recognized how important broadband was, and not just for our urban centers, but how critically important it was to keep rural America connected during a very challenging time, to make sure that those rural communities had the technology they needed, that they could continue to move forward. Every story that came back about kids doing their homework in a McDonald’s parking lot broke my heart and broke everybody’s heart, but I feel like a little bit of the V8 moment where you slap your head and you’re like, “We’ve been telling you for years this stuff is very important. Connectivity is important, making sure we don’t leave anybody behind regardless of where they live.”

Shirley Bloomfield:

I now look at all of the lessons learned, all of the stories policymakers have carried forward to this point in time were between the recovery money that went out where a lot of it was designated to broadband, to this moment where we pass this infrastructure initiative that is a historic amount of funding for broadband, and this overall recognition how critical it is for us to actually get the job done once and for all. However, there’s a small part of me that is kind of like the first person to arrive at a party and then everybody else comes to the party and they’re like, “Hey, wait, we’ve been here a long time talking about this stuff.”

Joe Coldebella:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Shirley Bloomfield:

But I think it’s time for everybody to take that momentum and really move it forward, and really be thinking about, “Okay, if we’ve got the ear, if we’ve got the focus and we’ve got the attention, how do we get this done? How do we do it right?”

Joe Coldebella:

No, I couldn’t agree more because I think people… Broadband has always been in the background. It was like until the pandemic put a direct spotlight on it to say, “Hey, listen,” this is just the start because data and speed are only going to grow exponentially. My biggest fear is that moving forward is that the digital divide won’t narrow, but the digital divide itself will grow because there are a lot of communities that are getting gig service and then there are some folks that don’t even have any connectivity at all. That’s my biggest fear.

Shirley Bloomfield:

A lot of times then that’s where I bristle a little bit because people like to talk about the urban-rural divide. I would actually say I consider it more of a rural, rural divide. There’s a rural America that is served by community-based providers that have been leap years ahead in terms of providing service. One of the things and the data are now out of date, but my member companies have fiber to the home to 75% of their customers.

Joe Coldebella:

Wow.

Shirley Bloomfield:

That’s astounding. These are communities where on average they have five consumers per mile. I look at that and I say the real issue is some of these other areas of the country where there just hasn’t been that return, the ability to make the investment, the justification for doing so. That is where I think we’ve got a big job to do, but I’ll never forget. There was a member of Congress who sat on the Energy and Congress committee. He once said to me, “Broadband is nice to have. It’s not a must-have.” Well, we now as a country know that broadband is a must-have.

Joe Coldebella:

Yeah. No. Those are fantastic points. I think that it leads us to this event here today, SRC Live. SRC stands for…

Shirley Bloomfield:

Smart Rural Community.

Joe Coldebella:

It’s funny. As someone who is in the industry talking to all different folks, the word smart is thrown around quite a bit. I think that… Everyone has a different definition of it, but one of the things that I absolutely love that you guys are doing, you’re separating that. You’re creating a definition and you’re also creating an initiative. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Building Robust broadband networks vs building smart communities

Shirley Bloomfield:

You’re absolutely right. Who doesn’t want to have 47 different definitions of smart? But the way we look at it is we say, you know what? Our folks are building robust broadband networks. That’s not necessarily what makes the community smart. What makes it smart is that sense of collaboration on how you use the power of that network to do the things that are so important to a community, whether it’s economic development, whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s improving your access to technology in the school, whether it’s bringing senior care into the home for the elderly with healthcare. We think of this as the engine. It is truly the idea that “Yeah, okay, got a robust network, but how am I going to collaborate with my community leaders, my anchor institutions to actually make it smart, to use that technology for the good of the community?” That is really the whole premise behind why we’ve created this, to really tee up that sense of collaboration, discussion, engagement, and best practices, and think about what we can do to continue to push the rural prosperity that we think really is on the cusp of even growing. Nobody would’ve said that 10 years ago.

Joe Coldebella:

Right. Hopefully, it’s the start of a Renaissance.

Shirley Bloomfield:

We like to think so. You think about living in a rural community, you’ve got the ability. Oh my gosh, take DC traffic. I would give it to you any day, but the lifestyle, the close to nature, the sense of community that you get in these communities. Now that we’ve gotten so good at remote work, the ability to live where you want to live, and raise your children where you want to raise your children, and not let you be dictated or be tethered, but the anchor to doing all of that is the ability to have robust broadband. Otherwise, none of that happens.

Joe Coldebella:

It’s so true because, just talking to my friends or whatever, when they’re trying to hire folks, it’s like now that broadband is accelerating, their pool is growing. Now it’s accepted that if you live in the Heartland, you can get a job in New York City, or Florida, and work remotely. It’s really an incredible time.

Shirley Bloomfield:

It is. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve had our smart rural community program actually partner with an entity called fiberhomes.com because the other part of that equation is how do you then identify the homes that are served by fiber? Because you know what? It’s one thing to have a check box that says, “Okay, this house has broadband,” but what does that mean? You and I both know the definition could go anywhere there.

Joe Coldebella:

Absolutely.

Shirley Bloomfield:

But the idea to identify that this piece of real estate on an MLS shows that it is fiber-fed. Well, that is okay. You can do that job in New York City. You can be a programmer for a tech company in San Francisco. I think that partnership, which we’ve just gotten underway, is going to be really, really interesting to start creating these nationwide databases that are going to allow people who are looking for that mobility to identify, “Well, this is a great place to move.” That is also part of what we think about smart rural communities. You want to go to a place that embraces and celebrates the fact that it’s technologically forward, it’s future-forward, and it’s using that technology to power all of these applications.

Joe Coldebella:

It’s really an incredible point because now it seems like… I think I read that when people are looking for a house, the first thing they’re looking at is our bedrooms, but the second thing that they’re looking at is connectivity because if someone, a family lives in say, close to a bedroom community in New York City and one of them gets a job offer in say, Ohio, because of connectivity, the spouse might be able to work remotely while the other one goes into a local job, which is just incredible how much that opens up the job market for everyone.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely. But the other change on that, on the technology side, that nobody really wanted to acknowledge until the pandemic, we talk a lot about why fiber’s important. We talk a lot about why it’s smart to put this future-proof technology in now because you know what, to your earlier point, two or three years down the road, if you don’t do that, you’re going to be right back where you are. But I had a lot of folks who said to me, “You know what? Consumers don’t need synchronous speeds. They don’t need to be able to upload as quickly as they download.” Well, we learned that lesson during the pandemic.

Joe Coldebella:

100%. Yep.

Shirley Bloomfield:

If somebody’s not a VPN, somebody’s zooming into their school room, yes. We saw it. I talked to my providers and absolutely their demand for upload speeds just skyrocketed. Again, I think all of those pieces have to come together if we’re going to do this right.

Joe Coldebella:

It’s so funny too because I’m sure we all have stories, but obviously, we do the podcast. When we have guests, sometimes… There was a funny story where we were getting ready to record. He goes hold on a second. He goes, he had to run around his house and tell everyone to get off the internet because he needed to make sure that he had enough bandwidth. It’s so critical that we… I say that we need to set a floor. The ceiling is not what we need. We need a floor because broadband is only going to be more and more important.

Shirley Bloomfield:

That is where I look at some of these programs coming down and I think don’t aim too low. Don’t do this. We’ve got so much money and resources coming into the… If we aim too low with those speeds and that capacity, shame on us. We’re doing nobody a service. Even today, you heard Taylor Beatty, who is the state broadband director for the state of Tennessee, talking about her own personal passion for this because early in the pandemic, when she literally did have to negotiate with everybody else in her family to get off of devices when she had work calls. Well, talk about somebody now leading the effort for the state of Tennessee who feels it at her core why this is so important.

Joe Coldebella:

Yeah. She was phenomenal today. You’ve really brought a lot of great people together. It’s interesting as well, because one of the questions you asked is, you said, “All right, who in the audience is an SRC member?” You had a smattering go up. What is it that they need to be to qualify?

Shirley Bloomfield:

When we created this brand, we really created the idea of you don’t have to live in New York City to be in a smart city. We really started talking about what it means to be a smart rural community, and be a provider who is powering that. We had to set some standards because otherwise, a brand for brand’s sake means absolutely nothing. One of the things we basically said is you’ve got to have network capability. If you apply, if you’re an NTCA member and you apply to be a smart rural community provider, you have to show that you are capable of providing over a hundred megabits of service to at least 50% of your study area. You’ve got to show that you have built out your network that far. You’ve also got to certify that at least 50% of your customers subscribe to the broadband internet service that they offer so that you are getting that adoption. Those are some of the criteria that we are looking at. The third is a little bit more objective where we basically say, “Okay, when you get this designation, we also want to see your commitment to collaborating with your community leaders, with your anchor institutions, with your key service providers, to actually make your community a smart rural community.”

Joe Coldebella:

That’s so important because I think, and everyone here that I’ve talked to, that’s one of the most important things is that you need to, the ISPs, need to reach out and find those champions because those are the folks that help get things done. I think it’s phenomenal just listening to folks and how excited they are in terms of just the opportunity you guys are giving folks.

Shirley Bloomfield:

I think we sometimes just assume though, Joe, that people connect the dots, or they know how to connect the dots, but to have this morning, for example, Alan Pratt, with the National Rural Education Association says, “I need you to reach out to your K through 12 superintendents and the education community leaders in your community because they don’t know how to do it.” They don’t know what they need in terms of technology, but you, ISP, for you to go and reach out and say, “What do you need? What can we do? How do we make your job easier? How do we help improve the educational opportunities for the youth in our community?” Getting that message from the horse’s mouth, as it were, is really important for folks to hear.

Joe Coldebella:

No, and you know what it is, I think that the ISPs really need to understand, and I’m sure they do, is that when they reach out to the educators, they have five or six, or 10, or 50 things on their plate. When you have this advocate for them, or for the service, it’s just that it gets people excited.

Shirley Bloomfield:

It does. I think the other thing is that the ISPs can also work with the schools to say, what do you want to do and we will help you get there? Is your goal simply to do statewide testing and have everybody on the network at the same time, or is it to create a hybrid educational system, or is it to create new opportunities to do the online training for those who’ve already graduated from high school, but want to do tech training or recertifications? What do you want to do? We’ll be your solution provider. I think thinking about that kind of partnership is where the rubber really hits the road.

Joe Coldebella:

Right? No, that’s great too. It’s one of those things where I’m sure everyone is now running to their computer and they’re looking to sign up because it’s so exciting, but what is also some of the other benefits that you get in terms of when you’re an SRC member?

Shirley Bloomfield:

It is a couple of things. One is that having this designation, I think, is really, sets you apart. It’s the ability to say, “You know what? I’m not just a broadband provider. I have created a smart world community.” We encourage people to think about how to work with their communities to do that celebration and to entice folks to move into that community and bring businesses and create opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Shirley Bloomfield:

For example, I’ve got folks who you’ll start driving into their town, you get the sign that says, “Welcome, you’re entering a smart world community.” Well, that’s kind of cool. You get to brand. You get to brand your community using that technology. We’ve got a lot of different tools that go into the branding arena that help share the story. The other thing is it creates a platform for telling the story. One of the things, even today, that we heard here at SRC Live is these companies are pretty modest, by nature. They do amazing things,  but they don’t tell it because they kind of are like, “Well, that’s just what you do.” Well, you know what? You’re doing cool stuff and if you don’t tell people, they don’t know. Creating this brand allows people to say, “I’ve got this platform now. Let me now tell you why this is a smart world community,” and it brings the community to the table. The community is the celebration. They’re the smart community. My guys are the driver. They’re the provider. Then you get everybody around the table and that just opens the door for further collaboration.

Joe Coldebella:

I’m sure it’s a source of pride as well. It’s like, “Look at what we’re doing. There are cities that are much larger than ours that are much further behind than us.” I think that one of the great things that you, as an organization, do as well, is that you get to raise your hand and say, “Hey, listen, there are great things happening in rural communities.” When you share those, it gets other communities excited and say, “Hey, let’s do that too.”

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely. That’s one of the advantages I think for the day and a half that we’re spending together, is the number of people who are already scribbling notes being like, “I could do that.” I’m hearing the story of what somebody just did with their local health clinic, I can do that, or work with a local nursing home. I think it’s that ability to share best practices and recognize that it’s not necessarily hard.

Do rural broadband shortcomings impact the overall economic growth?

Joe Coldebella:

Well, and I think what this conference has done, as well, is it’s basically put a focus on the four pillars that you talked about that give people an opportunity to tell the story to their folks and say, “Hey, listen, it’s not only about entertainment. There’s a lot of things that we can, when we have high-speed broadband connectivity, we can do to inject a Renaissance into our community.” I was wondering if you could talk about each one of those, the first one is economic development.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely. You think about economic development and you think about just what gets powered when you’re able to entice manufacturing or small businesses, or other entities that help be economic drivers for a community to be not just able to stay in business but to actually grow. I look at it like… I’ll take an example. We see a lot of folks who are Etsy providers who live in rural communities. They’re able to do that because they can sell what they make from their home in Dickinson, North Dakota, anywhere in the world.

Joe Coldebella:

Shirley, you took my thunder, because I actually read a story about… It was a family. They basically made cowboy boots. They were a small little operation, but they had an online presence and they went from surviving to thriving because it’s one of those things where your marketplace just expanded from 1500 or 15,000 to the entire world.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Let’s think about entrepreneurs, and let’s think about, does an entrepreneur need to live in the middle of San Francisco. No, you want to tap that person who can’t afford that one-bedroom place in San Francisco. There are great minds all over this country, but the ability to put those technology tools in the hands of somebody who’s thinking creatively, who might be the next Elon Musk, I don’t know, creating that next great idea. I think the ability to put broadband in is just a huge driver in terms of again, innovation and entrepreneurship. I think that is an area that rural America’s also really ripe for.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s awesome. One area that I would love to touch on as well is agriculture and livestock. Because if you were to say, “Oh, they don’t need broadband.” No, no, no, no. It’s the complete opposite. It’s a 180.

Shirley Bloomfield:

It is crazy how much you can do with smart ag, and how broadband facilitates that. I’ll be honest with you. When we get the opportunity to take FCC commissioners into the field, the first place I want to take them is to a farm. Not only to make sure they can muck up their shoes a little bit, but also for them to even see things like the care of cattle using smart technology on which cow is fertile at that point in time, or where is there an illness in the herd, but also, I’ve actually witnessed some of these livestock auctions. Seconds make the difference. These auctions are now primarily online. You go in and you’re like, “I’m going to get that bull.” Well, you know what, you’ve got the circle of death. You just lost the bid. It is really important to make sure that we keep that connectivity.

Joe Coldebella:

In terms of a macro level, just in terms of looking at what happened with the unfortunate situation in Ukraine, in Russia, with the exception of the US, it’s like most of the world takes their grain from those three primary places. Obviously, now we’ve got kind of a bug-a-boost, so efficiency is magnified a hundredfold.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely, and the data is there to show that if you use smart ag technology, how much more crop development we can do as a country and how much more self-reliant we can actually become. The tools are not that expensive, but it is the… You’ve got to have the connectivity. You’ve got to have the connectivity, not just to the farm, but to the barn and to the field.

Joe Coldebella:

Sure. No, absolutely. That’s fantastic. If we could move on, I would love for us to talk about healthcare, because I know that we had… You had someone speak today. I’ll be honest with you. It was not a completely rosy picture, which kind of scares me as well, because if we want this Renaissance to continue, healthcare has got to be one of those pillars.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Absolutely. It’s one of the first things that we were thinking of when we created smart rural communities and really started thinking about what kind of important dialogues have to take place. I could not put healthcare higher up on that list because you know what? You don’t have healthcare, you’re not going to have young families moving into a community. Thinking about a couple of things, what are the things that you can do with technology? Even though Alan Morgan was talking about the number of rural hospitals that are at risk, which is huge, if you can start to think about how you can pivot some of those services to the ability of folks to do home management, and the ability for clinicians to be able to connect with a teaching hospital in Minnesota, at Mayo.

Shirley Bloomfield:

We’ve done a lot of work with Vanderbilt, for example, who I think was a very early innovator in the telehealth space. They reached out and created six or seven rural community health clinics connected to their teaching hospital. My guys powered their clinics with broadband. Watching that come full circle is really important. I don’t even think we have touched the limit of what you can do with telemedicine. The one other thing I will say that we have found to be really powerful in rural America has been mental health support because when you’re in a small community, people are very loath to have their pickup truck seen in front of the local mental health clinic. The ability to do mental health support from the comfort of your home on an iPad is absolutely huge. What we are seeing is in terms of addiction support and other mental health services, that has been a rapidly growing area for people to seek support.

Joe Coldebella:

Love that story because it really is important. I also think what telemedicine allows, allows for more of a deeper conversation with your medical providers, because usually when you have an office visit with where you go to the doctor, unfortunately, he or she is going to spend 30 seconds, a minute, and it’s really… I had a telemedicine appointment where I spoke to the doctor for 45 minutes. If we could become better that way in terms of efficiencies, I think the possibilities are limitless.

Shirley Bloomfield:

It is actually significant. The other thing that we’ve done, which is very cool, is our foundation for rural service actually has created a program called the Virtual Living Room. We now have four or five up and running where we have partnered with the state VA offices to offer VA care in a library in a rotary club hall. The foundation has outfitted these places with a private space with a computer. My company, which is local, has donated broadband connectivity, which is a gig service, and the ability for local vets because there are a lot of vets that come from rural America. What we’ve done is we’ve created these virtual living rooms that allow them to come in. They get virtual care. They are able to do therapeutics. They are able to do rehab. They’re able to do mental health, and they’re able to do their paperwork. The ability to create those opportunities so they’re not driving four hours to Lexington, Kentucky. They’re able to do it for McGee, Kentucky.

Joe Coldebella:

Then they probably would be more apt to do it because who wants to drive four hours and then?

Shirley Bloomfield:

And do a follow-up.

Joe Coldebella:

Right. Exactly. I’m sorry. This form is incorrect. You need this certain type of information and they’re like, “Oh well, then I’m just not going to worry about it.”

Shirley Bloomfield:

Never mind. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a real win-win. We also run a healthcare program. We provide healthcare benefits to our member company employees, watching Teledoc, which we offer during the pandemic, SkyDoc use was a 41% increase in terms of use. Do you know what’s interesting? Now that the pandemic has waned a little bit, we have not seen that number go down as much as you would’ve thought. It’s now about 35%, but now people have figured out, “I have a sinus infection. Let me just schedule an appointment from my desk.”

Joe Coldebella:

Sure. Right. No, right. Exactly. It’s also an opportunity, hopefully, where people are preemptive, because the worst thing is waiting until the last minute, “Oh, I got to go into the doctor,” or whatever, but if you could just hop on the internet in your home, speak with a medical provider and get some answers, that way a little problem doesn’t turn into a big problem, and that solves a lot of problems.

Shirley Bloomfield:

A lot of problems. Yeah. You’re so right.

Joe Coldebella:

Oh, that’s great. The fourth pillar I would love to talk about is education, because I think that education, especially in terms of broadband, is sort of tricky, because I had Alan on earlier and we talked about how it was of educating via Zoom wasn’t as successful as we would’ve liked it to have been, but I think he made a great point. He said it should be a part of the solution, not the solution.

Shirley Bloomfield:

I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons now. Let’s just say that we hadn’t had a pandemic and we’d really been able to be thoughtful about how we do remote learning. What does that look like? How do we use technology? But honestly, everybody was just thrown into like, “Okay, you’re going home.” The other thing I would say, is, first of all, you had the connectivity issue, and then you have the, “I need to get to the student’s homes.”

Shirley Bloomfield:

One of the things that I loved about my company is, and I’ll just share this story. In North Dakota, as soon as the pandemic hit, my companies literally went to the state department of education and said, “Who’s unconnected? Which kids do we have in the state that don’t have connectivity?” The companies, all of my companies together in the state gathered together on that list. Within two weeks, 98% of school children in North Dakota had connectivity to their homes so that they were not disrupted. But think about if we’d actually been able to plan and teachers had been able to learn how to use the technology. That became a bigger barrier than we would’ve thought, that you suddenly had these teachers being like, “What? You’re going to put me in front of a camera and I have to do what? What do I hit next?” Well, I’d like to think that now, if we think about how we use this technology, we’ve learned lessons and we’ve learned how to teach people to be better adapters to the technology.

Joe Coldebella:

I would hope what we would do is also evolve and understand that teachers can also be facilitators. Instead of just having a lecture, or in terms of just doing the basics, is also, have an opportunity to maybe bring in a professor from Harvard, or do different things that really can ignite the imagination of the students. I think that’s the real opportunity for broadband and education, especially in rural communities.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Could not agree with you more. You have access to speakers and to thought leaders that you wouldn’t because they may not be willing to come out to South Dakota, but you know what can you get them to come in and share some of their insights? I think there’s so much room for us to be creative in terms of the education front. But the other thing I would say is, that I thought today’s message was very interesting, which was really a call to my ISPs to take the lead in working with their schools and their anchor institutions to say, what do you need? What can we do? How can we help? How can we be part of your solution?

Joe Coldebella:

Right. Because it’s one of those things where you let the government officials, someone to lean on because that’s the hardest thing is when you enter a space and you’re uneducated you… Should I ask this question? Or, I don’t want to bother them, but it’s like, if they, if the ISPs go to the educators, go to the local communities, then they’re like, “Oh, these people want to help me. This is going to be great.”

Shirley Bloomfield:

Right. Absolutely. That is part of what we are trying to facilitate here, is that idea of opening up those doors, having those conversations. It’s not scary. Hopefully, as people compare notes and best practices, we can share those across the industry and see even more evolution of some of these discussions.

Joe Coldebella:

Awesome. All right. As we do wind down this awesome conversation, really appreciate the time, we like to ask all our guests two standard questions. The first question is our back-to-the-future question. Shirley, I’m going to give you the keys to DeLorean and you can go back in time, 5, 10, 15 years, however, you want to. If you could whisper something in your ear, or someone else’s ear to make the journey a little bit easier, what would you say?

Shirley Bloomfield:

If I look at it from my industry’s perspective, I think what I would’ve said would have been, “Look to the future. Don’t be shortsighted.” I would’ve said, if I look back 10 years, I would’ve said, I would’ve been promoting things like, let’s leapfrog technologies. Let’s think about fiber. Let’s not think about how I amp up my copper and make it livable for the next X number of years. I would say think big, reach further, and be future focused. I would’ve probably pushed us a little bit harder. I think we’ve done that a lot in the last few years.

Joe Coldebella:

Absolutely.

Shirley Bloomfield:

But I would say 10 years ago, to be saying any upgrades you do, leapfrog. Let’s leapfrog.

Joe Coldebella:

I love that because it’s one of those things where, and you know more than anyone, is that there was the copper technology that was 40, 70 years. We’re now entering that, the next phase, which is the fiber stage, which is the high-speed connectivity phase. It cannot last five years. It needs to last 50 years because the world is only getting more connected.

Shirley Bloomfield:

The other thing that I worry about a little bit, because I will tell you, we’re so fiber focused, I will have others in the industry poke me a lot, that we are aiming too high. I keep thinking about a couple of things. First of all, let’s not be shortsighted again. Second of all, this is an amazing amount of resources coming down the pike, shame on us if we aim low and set a low bar because you know what? There will not be this kind of money coming again. If we don’t do it right the first time, and I think about rural America, and I kind of think the analogy of infrastructure build, highway money, why would we fix a pothole? Why wouldn’t we build a new super highway? I think we have this opportunity to do that. I do think that there’s this chance to be thinking about it, and from operational efficiency, we’re having a hard time getting a workforce in rural America. You put in fiber technology, it is efficient, it reduces truck rolls, and it allows you to actually better utilize your workforce because you’re able to manage a lot of that from the CO instead of driving three hours into the field to figure out where’s the problem.

Joe Coldebella:

We definitely addressed a lot of the crystal ball, but I’d still like to ask that question to you in terms of, if you look into the future, what gets you excited? What gets you excited for your members? What gets you saying, “Oh, we’re on the right path.”

Shirley Bloomfield:

That is, I think we are at that moment. That’s where I really think that is this broadband moment. That’s where I’m really hoping people take this opportunity. I look into the future and I say, “Where will we be in 2030? Will we have connected all Americans?” Because I think we have this opportunity now to do it. I look at my companies and I say, “Okay, you know what? They’re not the biggest providers, but they have the biggest hearts, and they have the biggest spirit in terms of the spirit of service.” I’d like to think that what we’ll be looking at is a landscape where my companies, who’ve already done the job in their communities, but I look at them and say, “All right, where are the solution in the digital divide to the parts of the country that nobody else has wanted to pick up at this point in time? How do we make that doable? How do we make those communities that are out there connected to the whole?” I think there’s just a huge opportunity for us as the United States to do this right. I think my guys will be front and center.

Joe Coldebella:

All right. If these folks want to get in contact with your guys, where can they go? What can they do? How can they learn more about the SRC events and everything in general?

Shirley Bloomfield:

Obviously, at our website, www.ntca.org. You can go ahead and maneuver through there. Our smart rural community initiative also has, as you can leverage your way right through the website as well, or Google smart rural communities, and you will find us under NTCA.

Shirley Bloomfield:

I would also say, one of the things I tried a few years ago was to do a broadband match.com. I thought this is how I’ll connect with people. That did not take off quite as I anticipated, but you know what? Folks can always reach out to me. If somebody’s saying, “You know what? We’ve got this initiative, and I’d really like to connect with some ISPs somewhere in my area.” One of the other things I will say, Joe, that we’ve learned, you don’t have to be contiguous to be the solution provider. I’ve got broadband providers who are building broadband and communities 200 miles away because they can. The partnerships that can be facilitated are very exciting. Feel free to reach out to me directly. I am more than happy to play matchmaker.

Joe Coldebella:

It’s been an absolutely awesome discussion. I would love to issue a return visit, maybe next year we come back and see where we are because it’s been an absolutely fantastic discussion. Thank you so very, very much.

Shirley Bloomfield:

Thank you so much, Joe. Appreciate it.

Joe Coldebella:

On behalf of Shirley and everyone at the Broadband Bunch, thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.