California wanted to bridge the digital divide but left rural areas behind. Now that's about to change
Until a few years ago, most students in Winters — a farming community of 7,000 west of Sacramento — did not have computers at home. So the city’s then-mayor, Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, pushed for a program that enabled the school district’s sixth-graders to check out laptops along with their textbooks.
Their parents were required to learn how to use the computers as well. For some, it was their first time surfing the web or sending an email.
“Now they could be a voice for their child,” said Aguiar-Curry, who grew up in Winters. She recalled that some parents were moved to tears. “Now they could work in the fields during the day, and at night they could come home and get on their child’s tablet and find out how they were doing in school.”
Over the last decade, California’s urban centers have become technology hubs, cities where free Wi-Fi and fiber optic lines are ubiquitous. But in low-income neighborhoods, across the state’s inland regions and in rural communities — often home to large migrant populations — families struggle to connect at all.
Some elected officials see that reality as proof that a digital divide is leaving many people behind. And they’ve set out to remedy it.
In 2007, the state established the California Advanced Services Fund to offer companies incentive to help bridge the gap. The program has allowed broadband providers to apply for nearly $300 million in grants to bring fiber optic, copper and other cable lines to some of the poorest and hardest-to-reach regions in the state.
The goal was to connect 98% of the 12.9 million homes across California, one that as of 2016 was within a few percentage points of being fulfilled. But while nearly 12.3 million homes in urban areas had some form of wireline broadband service by that year, less than half of roughly 680,900 households in rural areas had been connected.
Even as recently as October in the tiny town of Laytonville, north of San Francisco, connectivity was so sparse that residents such as Dorje Bond struggled to know when and where to evacuate during the wildfires.
Trish Steel, executive committee chair of the Broadband Alliance of Mendocino County, only recently was able to sign up for broadband service. Before heading off to college four years ago, her son would often do his homework between midnight and 5 a.m., when their satellite data plan was unlimited.
In Winters, Aguiar-Curry said she persuaded an independent provider in 2014 to extend free Wi-Fi to a nearby public housing complex for a few hours each night so that dozens of students could do their homework. Later, she looked into applying for federal public safety grants to run fiber optic lines through a nearby dam, connecting fire departments and police stations that had poor or no internet access.
After her election to the state Assembly in 2016, Aguiar-Curry decided to help revive the California Internet for All Now Act. The plan, long stymied by opponents in the Legislature, proposed pumping more money into the California Advanced Services Fund and reshaping its mission so that communities like hers would benefit.
It turned out to be one of the toughest state political battles of 2017.