When solving the digital divide, it’s time to lose the Fiber-Only mentality.

I’m not anti-fiber, I’m pro solution. Let’s start there.

Communities across the United States, and throughout the world, differ greatly. That’s a given. Not all of them have the same budget, politics, layout, or density of population. One solution is hardly the answer to solve any problem a municipality faces. Digital equity is no different.

If there’s one thing that a global pandemic taught us, it’s that the lack of connectivity in all of our communities is a serious issue. It stops kids from being able to attend school, attain education, and do things like break the poverty cycle. It stops adults from being able to contribute to their households by attending work, maintaining jobs, and finding creative ways to make extra money. It takes away people’s access to healthcare, education, entertainment and more, with the residual effect of creating hiccups in our workforce, tax base, and ultimately municipal funding.

Lack of connectivity has an effect on every aspect of our society. In short, the plumbing that carries our economies and daily life is broken or nonexistent for a lot of communities, and this isn’t new. This has been going on for quite some time, all the pandemic did was show how bad it is and how often it’s been glanced over.

Now that the government is trying to dump hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to help solve this problem, it’s also showing off one of the main reasons why broadband and connectivity has yet to be as pervasive as everyone would like: Stubbornness.

There’s this wretched mentality that if a city doesn’t provide a fiber optic connection to every single household in its community that it’s not good enough. I wholeheartedly disagree with that statement. Telling a municipality that the only way they can solve the problem is by throwing the most expensive technology at it…