Here's what you can't see as hundreds of millions are spent to fill broadband gaps in Minnesota

The chatter about a digital divide has been going on since high-speed internet networks started being built in the 1990s.

It became background noise as our lives more and more revolved around our gadgets.

Decisions by Congress and the Biden administration over the last couple of years disrupted that noise like the sound of a record scratch. They decided to spend more than $65 billion this decade installing broadband to households, mainly in rural and tribal areas, that don't have it.

I've spent most of my career writing about the tech industry. And yet, when I read about this money being spent on rural broadband or the digital divide, I often think something like, "Wait, they're still working on that?"

With help from some Minnesota experts, here's my attempt to simplify a deeply complicated situation, to provide some context for what's unfolding in coming years.

First, this technology divide and slow road to ending it has a precedent. It took about 70 years for the U.S. to deploy an electric grid in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. In the mid-1920s, nearly everyone in America's cities had electricity and hardly anyone on farms did.

A giant acceleration happened during recovery from the Great Depression in the 1930s, when several agencies created under the New Deal focused on rural electrification. The Biden administration compares its efforts on broadband to that time.

As of last year, 88% of Minnesota's households had access to broadband, according to the state Office of Broadband Development. It defines a broadband connection as one with at least 100 megabits per second of download speed and 20 megabits per second of upload. That's fast enough for several people in a home to be streaming video and playing video games simultaneously.

Outside the Twin Cities metro area, 62% of households had that level of broadband connection.

Minnesota will get around $650 million in federal broadband funds. State officials will direct much of that to construction outside the metro area.

Technical access is just one measure, however. Affordability is the other, though it is usually overlooked in the flood of news about construction projects.

Christopher Mitchell, who directs the community broadband networks program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, estimates there are now about 200,000 people in rural Minnesota without a broadband connection to the home — and about 200,000 people in the Twin Cities who can't afford one that's available to them.

"Sometimes I chafe at it being described as a rural problem," Mitchell said. "There's a bunch of places in Minnesota that have higher-quality internet access and pay less than I do in St. Paul."

Second, as with anything involving big spending whether it's a government or business project, the chances are high that money will be misdirected or overspent.

One of the big differences between now and the rural electrification rollout in the 1930s and 1940s is that small companies, often cooperatives, based in the communities they served did most of the hard work.

Data show some of the biggest access gaps for broadband are in rural areas served by the legacy companies of the Baby Bell system of the 1980s and 1990s. Mitchell said he fears too much of the broadband infrastructure money will go to those big companies, when firms with a local or regional focus have extended broadband to farther reaches.

"The state should be preferencing federal dollars going to projects that are locally rooted," Mitchell said. "A company where the owner and employees are in the community, go to the local church and shop in the grocery store makes different investment decisions than a national one."

That thinking aligns with the rising technical knowledge and skills in Native American tribes, where broadband service is statistically most scarce.

At a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis last week, tribal telecom experts described the broadband build-out as a turning point for both economic power and Native American sovereignty.

"When you manage your own communications opportunities, you can cater to your community's needs," Matthew Rantanen of the Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association said at the meeting. "It's time that we are providers, not consumers in this space."

Third and finally, while the return on investment is lower to extend broadband to people living in the most remote places, it's worth it.

Absence of broadband means absence of opportunity for people and places. Slow-growing Minnesota can't afford to miss opportunities.

"Broadband is a foundation for economic development, for educational access, for health care, for all of those things that we inherently know," said Madonna Peltier-Yawakie, president of Turtle Island Communications Inc. in Brooklyn Park, which designs and installs network systems for tribal nations.

She watched the internet proliferate in a career that began at U.S. West, the Baby Bell that served Minnesota and 13 other states, as an outreach manager to more than 100 tribal nations. In 2001, she and her husband started Turtle Island to design network systems for tribes.

They are looking forward to broadband projects that will at last replace copper lines that were old when they first started in telecom.

"That infrastructure is pretty much intact on tribal lands," she said. "So much has not changed."