Danielle Kassander is a Twitch streamer and mental health advocate from Western Pennsylvania. In her job, access to high-speed broadband is not a luxury, but an absolute necessity.
“On my channel, I provide people with resources to help them deal with their issues, and more importantly, I provide a place to share their stories,” Kassander said Friday during a Zoom call hosted by Pennsylvania Democrats.
But while some Pennsylvanians may take access to high-quality, quick services for granted, the state’s expansive, rural mid-level services can vary greatly from county to county or community to community, advocates and officials said Friday. And that makes the need to improve these connections all the more pressing.
“It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” Kassander said. “It saves lives.”
After Congress passed and signed President Joe Biden into law last fall, a $1.1 trillion infrastructure bill is now available to states for broadband internet. The recent law includes: $65 billion as part of aid for the development of broadband connections in rural areas. Each country will receive at least $100 millionbut billions more will be available through federal aid applications, as the Capital-Star previously reported.
The newly formed bipartisan, bicameral Broadband Financing Commission met for the first time in Harrisburg earlier this month to begin considering how to spend the federal windfall and process aid applications.
“I think everyone, Republicans and Democrats, rural and urban, realizes that we have to solve this,” Gov. Tom Wolf told the Capital-Star after the inaugural administration meeting.
The Wolf administration has already done this created an office of broadband initiatives to support manage Internet expansion. But the recent government will now have legal force behind it.
During Friday’s press conference call, participants emphasized the interconnected nature of providing the kinds of connections that support support economic growth, which in turn helps revitalize communities.
“The industry has left rural Pennsylvania, and to get it back, we will need reliable broadband service,” said Donald Griner, a Cambria County-based representative of the American Council of State, Federal, City and County Employees. “This creates more places to open businesses that employ more people and provide a better standard of living for everyone. Once this investment is made, we will see businesses emerging and people moving in. This generates more tax revenues for local governments. without raising taxes. They can reinvest in infrastructure locally.”
The irony of the fact that he was speaking on a Zoom call, where a high-speed connection is required, was not lost on Griner, who said he had more than one choppy conversation early in the COVID-19 pandemic as tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians made the challenging transition to remote work, and in case of your children learning online.
Indiana County Auditor-elect James Smith said the funding will allow more Pennsylvanians to have access to the growing field of telemedicine, sparing them long drives to the doctor’s office.
“A lot of people travel from Indiana to Pittsburgh,” said Smith, a Democrat. “It’s because of these types of investments that they will have more options, so they won’t have to take a whole day off work to go to Pittsburgh to access high-quality health care.”
And although Republican lawmakers, including those in Pennsylvania, did not vote for the infrastructure bill as it moved through Congress, Smith said he believes support for broadband expansion should be bipartisan.
“We’ve been looking at this issue in Indiana County since 2018, and I’m glad we finally have the funding to actually make it happen,” he said. “This will make Internet access cheaper.”
In Harrisburg, the newly created state broadband authority must prioritize projects in areas where the Internet download speed is less than 100 megabits per second and the upload speed is 20 megabits per second – recent standards defended by lawmakers in Washington to expand Internet access.
According to 2019 Pennsylvania Rural Center report Based on 11 million speed tests conducted by Pennsylvanians, they found that most Pennsylvanians did not even have access to high-speed Internet under the venerable federal standard of 25 MPs download and upload speeds. Speeds were also slower in rural counties, the report found.
The expansion of the Internet was a sporadic vivid spot this session among both sides. The Sejm also adopted an act regarding polished expansion of 5G Internet in the Community last summer.
For Josh Boland, former head of the Somerset County Economic Development Authority, that’s good news.
Boland, who lives in the hilly Laurel Highlands region, says the region’s topography and impoverished service often make access a headache.
“I’m glad there’s money,” he said.
