Cisco aims to improve the availability and affordability of internet access through its recently opened Rural Broadband Innovation Center in North Carolina.

An initial $20 million investment for the effort was funded by Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration Program, the vendor’s vehicle for investment and co-development that’s spawned more than 1,000 active or completed projects in at least 40 countries that are home to about 60% of the world’s population.

“It is absolutely inexcusable for our rural communities to not have access,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said during a virtual event hosted by the vendor. 

“We’ve been talking about this for years and it’s time that we actually do something about it, particularly with what’s happened during the pandemic,” he said. “It highlighted this gap in a way that we had never seen before.”

The digital divide causes rifts in many forms, but the main contributing factors are access, cost, and know-how.

“Over the past 15 months we have come to realize that the digital divide is very, very real,” Cisco EVP Jonathan Davidson said. 

He recalled the shock he experienced in the early days of the pandemic when he saw a photo of two girls sitting on a sidewalk in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant to use the Wi-Fi to get their school work done. 

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to be in one of the richest countries in the world, one of the most technically afoot valleys in the world and to be without just basic connectivity,” the head of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group said. “If it can happen here in Silicon Valley, that means it can really happen everywhere.”

The connectivity challenge comes down to economics and the current dynamics are prohibitive, he said. “At Cisco, we’re focused on transforming the economics. We’re focused on lowering the costs of actually moving the bits to build and run the infrastructure and the internet in order to make the internet access available to all.”

Partners can visit Cisco’s lab, contribute ideas or technology and co-develop various scenarios for more widespread broadband deployment at a lower cost with an emphasis on multi-access convergences, simplified IP architectures, and cloud-native infrastructures. 

“No one can solve this alone. It is going to take the private sector, plus federal, state, and local. We have to change how we can bring broadband to all communities and we must change the economics in order to do that,” Robbins said.

Tens of millions of Americans are without internet access and they are counting on government agencies, service providers and technology vendors to “work together to fight for that more vibrant, inclusive broadband marketplace,” said Geoffrey Starks, commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). 

The FCC is working on issues of access, affordability, and digital skills development, he said.

North Carolina Governor Ray Cooper noted more than a million North Carolinians “are on the wrong side of the digital divide,” adding that it’s particularly acute in Black, Latino, and Native American communities.

“We know we’re going to have to invest significantly but we also have to remember that even if you’ve got the fiber by your home or the tower next door, if you can’t afford to subscribe then you’re not connected. If you don’t have a device, you’re not connected. And if you don’t know how to use it, you’re not connected,” Cooper said. 

Government funding is critical to offset some of these problems, but reaching underserved communities and informing people about the FCC’s Emergency Broadband Benefit Program poses its own challenges, TruVista COO Carla French explained. 

The regional telecom operator reached out to tens of thousands of presumably qualified candidates for the federally-funded program without response, she said, adding that government agencies also need to work together to improve the processes and funding for infrastructure deployment.

Coordinated commitment to funding is also critical “because now is our chance. We have never had the availability of the resources that we have now,” Cooper said, pointing to the large infrastructure legislation package currently under debate in Congress.

“You do see a bipartisan push now of folks that recognize that there are unserved areas but there are also pockets of urban folks that have affordability issues,” Starks said. “Over 30 million households simply cannot afford connectivity, and that includes a number of low-income folks that live in rural areas.”

Robbins ended the event on a hopeful and urgent note. “I’m optimistic that we can solve this together, but also know there’s a lot of hard work, there’s an awful lot of complexity, but I think that the time is now,” he said.