I recently spoke with a guy who lives 30 miles outside one of the larger cities in North Carolina. Where he lives there is zero broadband. It’s hilly and full of pine trees and they can’t even easily get satellite broadband. There is zero cellular coverage. Even though most of the people who live there work in the nearby city, from a broadband perspective it’s at the end of the earth. And there is very little prospect of anybody bringing broadband there without some sort of grant or other financial assistance to help pay for the construction.

This guy’s horror stories are familiar to the millions of others who live in similar situations. In order to send or receive an email he has to drive to the top of a hill 20 minutes from his house which is dangerous due to narrow road shoulders and heavy big truck traffic. If schoolkids or others in his area want a real broadband connection they have to go even further to find one of a handful of public hot spots.

Just recently there was a blog by two of the FCC Commissioners that suggested that the ‘wealthy’ people that live in rural areas ought to pay for their own broadband connections. But this guy’s neighborhood is not full of millionaires enjoying a mountain get-away retreat – they are everyday working people. The homes in his neighborhood were built decades ago before there was broadband, so nobody can be faulted for moving to the “sticks” and then demanding city services.

I would describe where he lives as a “broadband desert.” Broadband deserts are areas of our country that for some reason are unlikely to get broadband in any form. Sometimes they are remote (often due to terrain), and sometimes these are just the leftover places that never even got good telephone copper wires. These broadband deserts are not just in the most remote parts of the northern Rocky Mountains as those in the federal government might imagine – there are pockets of broadband deserts around all of us. A few years ago I was working with one of the most populous counties in Minnesota and they were shocked when our research identified a number of such pockets scattered around their county.

I believe these broadband desert areas are on the verge of being abandoned and blowing away if we can’t find a way to get them broadband. We have had three other major events in US history that have created ghost towns. The first was when many little towns were bypassed by the railroads in the late 1800’s and disappeared as a result.  Secondly, in the early 20^th century, towns that didn’t get electricity faded away. And finally, later in the 20^th Century, a number of little towns that were bypassed by the then-new Interstate highway system languished and many have now disappeared.

Broadband is next on this list of breakthrough technologies that will be vital for communities to continue to flourish. Towns without broadband are going to become irrelevant. People who live in these broadband deserts will soon be unable to sell their homes and will eventually walk away from them. And certainly nobody is going to build new homes or bring new businesses to places with no broadband. Families won’t be able to raise kids in the broadband deserts. People won’t be able to partake in the work-at-home economy that is proving to be a boon to a lot of rural America. Communities that don’t find a broadband solution are going to dry up and blow away just like the towns in the old west that were bypassed by railroads.

Probably the worst reality for this guy I was talking with was that he knows what broadband can do for a town. He runs a gigabit broadband network for a city that is used to connect city buildings. I met him at a meeting of CLIC NC, a local chapter of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice – a group that strongly advocates for gigabit fiber networks. This guy can see that many other similar neighborhoods in North Carolina are getting fiber to their homes because they happen to live in an area where a cooperative or small telco is willing to invest in their neighborhoods. But the majority of these rural broadband deserts are not so lucky and there is nobody even thinking about bringing them broadband.

The clock is ticking for these broadband deserts. If there is not a solution to help these folks within a decade it might be too late. People in these broadband deserts will reluctantly leave and it doesn’t take a whole lot of egress to push any town or neighborhood onto the irreversible path towards becoming an abandoned ghost town.

It seems to me that a lot of regulators and policy people are okay with this. These neighborhoods are often not large (although in some places entire counties have no real broadband) and by being scattered they don’t have much political clout. Without broadband and cellphone coverage they can’t even call or email to complain. They are easily ignored and easily forgotten.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Universal Service Fund was originally created to fix the problem of bringing telephone service to the most remote parts of the country. The original genesis of the USF was the belief that we are stronger as a nation when we are all connected. And that is probably truer for broadband than it was for telephone service. As a country we have the money to get broadband to everybody, but the question that most matters is if we have the political will.