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Iowa tour highlights importance of broadband

The importance of high-speed broadband service to farms and rural areas was the focus of an event in north-central Iowa on Wednesday.

The administrator of the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS)—Jonathan Adelstein—toured a farm near Rudd, Iowa where fiber-optic network service is being deployed by a local independent telecommunications company, OmniTel Communications.  Adelstein watched as a farmer used a broadband Internet connection to download data that he used to program GPS on his tractor.

Adelstein’s agency provided loans to help with the 35-million dollar OmniTel project.  He says such investments are important to everyone, especially rural youth.

“Who knows? The next Steve Jobs might come from Rudd,” says Adelstein, “but if he didn’t have access to broadband, he would never have the opportunity to learn and to grow and to have that experience.”

During the Wednesday tour, representatives of Iowa’s independent telephone companies expressed their concerns to Adelstein about the proposed National Broadband Plan. They believe regulations in the FCC plan would actually be detrimental to their efforts to keep building advanced networks and infrastructure in rural areas of the state. 

They call it “The Great Disconnect”.