The digital divide has roots in both fixed and mobile communications and efforts to date have merely moved the goalposts rather than closed the gap. The problem is that densely populated and more affluent areas reward advances by carriers more quickly, so inevitably are first to benefit from infrastructure upgrades. In any case, a divide is also maintained by cost of top end devices and even technical skill levels, which tend to sustain it, with implications for prosperity, health, and education.
The negative consequences of the divide have been known as long as it has existed and so have efforts to narrow it. In the USA, steps to alleviate the problem have been raised to federal level under the Trump administration, perhaps because a disproportionate number of his voters live in rural areas. These led to executive orders in 2018 covering rural broadband siting and streamlining the process for private companies to access the 7,000 towers on Department of Interior-controlled lands.
There is also the American Broadband Initiative at NTIA, while Congress has also weighed in with various initiatives. Most recently the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has confirmed it will allocate $16bn over the next 10 years for deployment of fixed wireless networks to rural locations presently unserved by broadband.
Ironically, some of these efforts have been set back temporarily by the escalating trade war with China, leading to the FCC banning Huawei and ZTE equipment in federally funded projects. In an effort to minimize fall out, Congress allocated $1bn in funding to help offset the rip-and-replace costs of removing Chinese equipment, but just for more local carriers with under 2m customers.
It is true apparent progress has been made, with LTE coverage increasing from 69.3% in 2017 to 83.3% of subscribers in 2018, according to the FCC, but again that could be just playing catch-up on legacy. These communities are unlikely to be high priorities for millimeter wave fixed 5G.
There is a similar picture in Europe, where the EU admitted in 2018 that it was failing to meet the stated objective of its Digital Agenda for 2020 of giving all citizens access to broadband at 30Mbps or higher. Accordingly, the EU set up its Action Plan for Rural Broadband, with the main enhancement being a cross-services approach between different agencies dealing with regional development, rural development and digital policy.
This six-part plan was designed to stimulate investment across these multiple parties and establish local projects to establish coverage in areas where it was patchy.
The impact of digital divides has been amplified by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic with increased reliance on broadband for both working and social contact. Among various celebrated cases, a UK darts player had to withdraw from a home-based tournament because the broadband connection was not fast enough to participate effectively. Others have found it hard to take part in online conferences or tutorials.
So while average broadband speeds have risen steadily almost everywhere, the gap has been maintained or even widened, as rural and poorer areas are always one or two steps behind.
The suggestion that 5G would automatically act to close the gap was naïve and even mischievous, because the divergence arises from a conspiracy between economics and physics. Over the air or through copper cable signals attenuate with distance, while the cost of running fiber to dispersed communities is prohibitive and unaffordable for the people affected, requiring a level of cross subsidy from the digitally well-endowed that no operator or for that government has felt able to implement.
Satellite has filled the breach in a small number of cases but is not a general solution to the rural connectivity conundrum because of the cost and limitations of uplink capacity. The role of satellite is then chiefly confined to broadcast communications where rural areas suffer little deficit, beyond lack of choice available to their urban counterparts with high speed cable and fiber connections.
Hopes were raised for 5G because of the potential for high speed FWA (fixed wireless access) as well as mobile communications, but widespread coverage over large rural areas can only be achieved with a sufficiently dense network, given spatial signal attenuation. Indeed, mmWave access will be even more impractical for rural communities given that it relies on smaller cells with shorter distances between devices and radio towers, all requiring backhauling as well.
However, more initiatives such as the EU’s six-point action plan have led towards some sort of solution even they too have failed to reduce the divide to date. The latest thinking is that operators, regulators, and governments can only go so far and that parity with urban areas can only be achieved with the active involvement of the local community, including contributions towards the work involved.
The aim is to establish hybrid networks that plug local connectivity using available bands into operators’ 5G infrastructures, perhaps in partnership. The hope is that this will swing the economics towards greater investment in rural broadband without requiring significant cross-subsidy. It could mean that use of DSS (Dynamic Spectrum Sharing) may not be confined to migration from 4G to 5G.