Advocates for fiber optic internet service in Seward County are sad, deflated and frustrated by late-project federal rule changes that slashed significant portions of the broadband technology they have worked to win for area residents.
But they are not done yet.
Misty Ahmic, chair of the Seward County Board of Commissioners, and Jonathan Jank, president and chief executive officer of the Seward County Chamber and Development Partnership, are among the members of the Seward County Broadband Task Force who are continuing to speak up and are asking others to do the same.
As she has done previously, Ahmic has now asked leaders from 77 other counties to send letters to Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts and Reps. Mike Flood, Don Bacon and Adrian Smith to ask them to advocate for Nebraska’s broadband funds. She hopes Seward County residents will, too.
On Sept. 10, the Nebraska Broadband Office (NBO) closed its comment period on the final draft of the Broadband, Equity, and Accessibility Deployment (BEAD) Program, for which the state had been allocated $405 million in the Biden administration’s infrastructure funding measures.
But the final plan calls for the state to spend only $43 million, eliminating many proposals in which rural Nebraskans would receive fiber optic internet connections.
Seward County learned in June that the 1,724 locations it had qualified as needing internet service or internet improvements in the Broadband Challenge were cut to 629 because of the Trump administration’s changing views on that kind of funding.
The program is administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which according to its website advises the president on telecommunications and information policy issues.
NTIA will now have 90 days to review the final draft the NBO and 35 other states have submitted based on the new “Benefit of the Bargain” BEAD program guidelines it adopted to “turbocharge speed and savings” for implementation of broadband accessibility measures according to a Sept. 5 news release.
In the comments submitted for the county task force, Jank told the NBO that Seward County is looking toward the future.
“Before the recent NTIA BEAD rule changes, we were well positioned to deploy fiber throughout Seward County and our state,” Jank wrote. “We are disappointed in these changes as they will not help us achieve the connectivity goals we have for our county, which is fiber to every resident, business, and ag operation.”
In interviews, Seward County broadband advocates say taking the less expensive route to broadband access is short-sighted.
Fiber optics, both District 24 Sen. Jana Hughes and Jank say, is now a needed utility.
“It really all comes back to, as I say tongue-in-cheek, we want fiber to the cow in Seward County,” Jank said. “It is the only option that future-proofs us.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Think of it like the electrification in our country back in the day.”
Ahmic said the satellite and fixed wireless technologies mean more towers will be needed around the state. While there is a place for those technologies, the option of buried fiber optics provides reliability and scalability the other technologies cannot.
“We are going to be behind the ball again when fixed wireless ages out, and it does age out. We will have missed this great opportunity,” she said.
Hughes is also disappointed.
If the state wants to keep and attract people to live and work here, it needs to assure solid broadband access for remote workers, she said. Internet connections are vital to education, healthcare, business and many everyday needs.
“The feds, I think, pulled the rug from all of these,” she said. “They are not going to let us have that money.”
But Jank said decisions on the overall program are being made at the federal level.
“What we acknowledge in this is that it is a political process,” Jank said.
Ahmic disagrees with the idea that the money allocated can be removed.
“The money was allocated. The states are not fighting hard enough to expend it,” she said.
Despite being sad about the current situation, Hughes said the state needs to see where this goes and begin to look at other options, perhaps working with public utilities.
She said public utilities have installed fiber optic connections for their substations and operations with “dark fiber” that has not yet been put to use.
“If we can do it ourselves, that option needs to be looked at,” Hughes said.
She also noted that some rural areas of Nebraska – and North Dakota – have had fiber optic service for years because they previously had small, local telecommunication providers who put it in “before fiber was cool.”
In the NBO’s final plan, only the Garland Volunteer Fire Department is listed among about 50 Community Anchor Institutions (CAIs) to receive fiber optic service.
Ahmic said getting fiber optic connections to community places like fire departments, libraries and other public spaces is a start, because it gives people access, but also because once a fiber trunk is in place expansion is possibility.
The Garland CAI is near the northeast section of Seward County where an earlier grant enabled installation of fiber lines at a cost exceeding $9 million. They now serve more than 500 households.
Across the state, the final plan calls for 58.11% of the broadband needs to be met by fixed wireless technology, 32.87% by satellite technology, and 9.02% to be served by fiber options.
Among the 37 state plans tracked by Oliver Borchers-Williams, broadband director at the Southeast Nebraska Development District, Nebraska so far ranks last in its use of fiber optics, though all on the list show cuts in funding.
Thirty-one state plans show fiber optics as 40% or more of their plan, led by Arizona and Alabama, where more than 75% of the BEAD plan is designated for fiber optics at this time.
Borchers-Williams said the NTIA has been “heavy handed” and some of these plans may be “renegotiated.” He expects the total awards to decrease as the states work toward finalizing plans.
Ahmic’s best-case scenario would be to have people speak up to their elected officials, including the Nebraska federal delegation and the governor.
“Make a phone call and express how unfortunate this is,” she said.
Ahmic said people understand the lawmakers have many issues to follow right now, but “this is something that impacts most of rural Nebraska.”
Seward County’s Broadband Challenge tested areas without internet bandwidth and also the level of service provided by existing service providers, which sometimes did not live up to what residents were purchasing. The Seward County push for testing identified around 5,000 locations in the county where access or service were deemed lacking, which was more than a third of the locations identified in the state.
Needs were identified in Beaver Crossing, Bee, Garland, Goehner, Milford, Pleasant Dale, Seward, Staplehurst and Utica, as well as county border towns Gresham, Malcolm and Ulysses.
The Seward County Board of Commissioners asked SCCDP to coordinate the Seward County Broadband Task Force, which also included the Southeast Nebraska Development District, industry partners and area residents.
A May 25 Associated Press report indicated the Trump Administration wants to end the $2.75 billion program set out by the bipartisan 2021 Digital Equity Act.
