Georgia Cyber Center looking to help close the broadband gap in Georgia

The COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus the digital divide in Georgia between those who have good internet access and the more than 500,000 homes and businesses that do not, leaders and advocates said.

But getting that service to sparsely populated and rural areas is still a problem and one the Georgia Cyber Center in Augusta is eager to dive into.

According to the Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative, 507,341 locations in Georgia lack access to even minimal levels of internet service, about 70% in rural areas. Nearly a third of rural Georgia lacks good access, including 26 counties where more than 50% of homes and businesses don't have broadband.

More:Half a million in Georgia don’t have decent internet. What is the state doing about it?

During the pandemic last year, as schools closed and people tried to work from home, "it became even clearer how critical access to broadband internet is in our communities," particularly in rural areas, Gov. Brian Kemp said.

The internet "is the interstate of today's world," Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said. "High-quality internet is more important than ever to each and every one of us." 

That hit home with Chris Apsey, director of the Cyber Range at Georgia Cyber Center.

"COVID exposed a gap in connectivity, not that we didn’t know it was there previously but it really brought to the forefront how devastating this was on communities that didn’t have good access," he said.

It was particularly hard on kids in those areas, Apsey said.

More:New broadband map highlights underserved areas in surrounding counties

The community "you live in is actively determining the quality of your education, more so than is normal," he said. "That’s just not OK. These kids have basically lost a year of their education."

Help is on the way through millions of dollars in funding.

Kemp just signed a mid-year budget that has $20 million he requested to expand broadband access in Georgia. Some of Georgia's electric membership cooperatives recently announced a $200 million partnership to provide broadband access to 80,000 locations in middle Georgia. And the Federal Communications Commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund just awarded more than $326 million over the next 10 years to 15 projects in Georgia to extend access to more than 140,000 locations.

But the way the FCC defines an unserved area – where just one customer in a census block getting a certain level of broadband access is considered served – is different than the way Georgia defines it, said Deana Perry, executive director of the Georgia Broadband Team, which has been working on the problem and mapping the state to define those unserved areas.

Georgia considers a census block unserved if 20 percent or more there can't receive broadband service of at least 25 megabits per second on download and three megabits on upload. That means there are 12,316 census blocks in the state that are unserved that don't fit the FCC's criteria and wouldn't be covered, according to the 2020 Broadband Report.

That is "close to 300,000 locations across the state that are not eligible for FCC funding," Perry said. "That’s where we think other funding sources should be focused so we can close that gap."

The rural power companies are doing a good job meeting that need in many areas by running lines to homes and businesses but there are many areas where the density is too low to ever make it economically feasible, Apsey said. So Georgia Cyber is looking to fixed wireless solutions and has hired a radio frequency engineer to look at different modes and technologies, he said.

"What could work best in this kind of area?" Apsey said. "There’s lots of options. Why don’t we just test them all and see what works best?"

The engineer will set up in Taliaferro County, where 54% of the county is considered unserved and the topography is similar to much of rural Georgia, and gather data for about a month.

While Georgia Broadband is "technology neutral," fixed wireless could be part of the solution, Perry said.

"I do think it is going to take multiple resources," she said. "There is no one size fits all (solution), there is no silver bullet, meaning it will take different technology solutions, such as a wired or fixed wireless. It will take multiple different approaches from different service providers and certainly different funding sources."

There are a couple of intriguing avenues for reaching those distant and scattered homes and communities through wireless technology. One utilizes TV white spaces, the unused frequencies between over-the-air broadcast signals. 

"There are unused channels," Apsey said. "So you can repurpose the unused spectrum between the TV stations that are active in a given area to provide internet via that spectrum. Reutilizing that spectrum is huge because it can travel really great distances, which makes it significantly better than traditional fixed wireless, which have issues with rain and trees and all of that other stuff. Obviating that would be a huge win for Georgia, given all of the trees we have in our state."

Think of it as the way people used to put rabbit ears on a TV set and could bring in distant stations.  

"We think (that technology) makes sense for some of the hardest to reach areas of the state but there has got to be other parts of the solution as well," Apsey said.

Another is what is known as the Educational Broadband Service, other areas of the frequency spectrum that have been reserved for educational broadcasts.

"But no one has really used it," Apsey said, and the license holders have leased those channels out for other purposes, such as to wireless phone providers. But the FCC will begin auctioning off those channels and that could be an opportunity for Georgia providers to expand broadband that way as well.

"Up to this point there has been no usage" of those channels, Apsey said. "It’s basically dead air. I think it is really promising for the future."

The cyber center plans to gather its data for about a month or so and submit a report to the state sometime in April or May, he said.

"We just want to provide data for policymakers," Apsey said. "This is really kind of closing the gap. How do we do that last mile of the least served people in our state to ensure everyone has equal access? That’s the goal."