Rural America is stranded in the dial-up age

As in many rural communities, broadband here lags behind in both speed and available connections. Federal data shows only a fraction of Washington County’s 25,000 residents, including Ms. Johnson, have internet service fast enough to stream videos or access the cloud, activities that residents 80 miles away in St. Louis take for granted. Some rural communities have successfully done the job themselves.In central Missouri, Co-Mo Electric Cooperative, Inc., a not-for-profit, customer-owned co-op formed in 1939 to deliver electricity, started a fiber-optic network that has built connections to 25,000 members in a region more sparsely populated than Washington County. So far, it has 15,000 subscribers, including non-members in neighboring communities.Co-Mo’s members, which include farms and businesses, realized they were falling behind, said John Schuster, board chairman of Co-Mo Connect, the internet service. Residents had to drive to the parking lot of a community college to work online. Students at local schools were cut off from the internet.The cooperative, after failing to obtain government subsidies, borrowed $80 million from two private institutions that serve utilities and went door to door asking members to contribute $100 each. In 1939, the co-op asked each member to contribute $5 toward electrification. Rather than only digging trenches for fiber-optic cable, Co-Mo strung cable along its own utility poles and rented space on others. An estimated 70% of Co-Mo internet subscribers have 100 Mbps service that costs $49.95 a month, Mr. Schuster said.The co-op’s internet service is doing well financially, Mr. Schuster said, but “the definition of making money for me and for a shareholder from AT&T is going to be two different things.”Such local broadband systems are tough to duplicate. Nearly all government subsidies go to major telecommunication providers, a legacy of the FCC’s long relationship with phone companies, said Jonathan Chambers, a former FCC strategic planning chief, now a consultant to cooperatives.