Rural Broadband Quotes

Infrastructure investment is critical to closing the digital divide in our country and bringing high-speed Internet access to more rural Americans.

There's a tremendous amount of rural areas where the constituencies tell me on a regular basis that they are underserved by the availability of broadband.

In general, we need America to take its game up a notch when it comes to broadband. It's important to acknowledge the billions and billions of dollars of investment in fiber. But we need more.

One way or another, we need to understand that broadband is essentially telephone service, and just as we got to telephone service in the United States to one hundred per cent, we need to do it for broadband.

Down the country, people in rural areas are struggling to get a speed of even 1 MB, not much better than the old dial-up system we used to have when the system was in relative infancy.

Next-generation networks are hard to build. It takes a lot of money and effort to lay fiber, install wireless infrastructure, build satellite earth stations, and more. It also requires a reasonably certain business case for deployment, which is all too often hard to prove in parts of the country with sparse population and/or lower incomes.

Increasingly, meeting the connectivity needs of all Americans - no matter where you live - means freeing up spectrum to meet the growing demand for wireless broadband.

One of the things I think we have to do is make sure that college is affordable for every young person in America. And I also think that we're going to have to rebuild our infrastructure, which is falling behind, our roads, our bridges, but also broadband lines that reach into rural communities. So there are some things that we've got to do structurally to make sure that we can compete in this global economy. We can't shortchange those things. We've got to eliminate programs that don't work, and we've got to make sure that the programs that we do have are more efficient and cost less.