2009 Recovery Act Case Study

Sitting down in front of your computer surfing the web, using your smartphone or tablet to post to social media, or turning on your favorite streaming video service for a movie with lightning fast internet speeds has become second nature to most of the world. This, however, is not the case in some rural communities in America. This has been changing since the 2009 Recovery Act was passed into law. Rural communities have steadily been getting the opportunity to join the urban core and experience broadband speeds from their internet provider. Although the process of getting broadband internet into these communities is time-consuming and very costly the value of doing it is worth the price. This opportunity for the rural community to have consistent
This initiative was designed to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, rural areas (Federal Communications Commission, 2016). With the passing of this act, nearly 7 million rural residents received access to better quality and more reliable internet. With the act in place, my home state of Missouri applied and received from the act $142.3 million to lay 2,500 miles of fiber optic cable and construct 200 new broadband towers throughout the state of Missouri. I have been fortunate enough to be involved in the placing of that fiber throughout the state's rural communities since the beginning of the program.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2015 voted to change the definition of broadband internet from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps download speed and changed the upload speed to 3 Mbps from 1Mbps (Pramuk, 2015). Existing copper telephone cable is currently used to bring the internet into the home if fiber is not available, this method of receiving the internet is outdated and unreliable in rural communities that have not had any updates to the telephone exchanges. Once this fiber is brought into these rural communities; schools, businesses, and farming changes
Currently, I am involved in a project in Northwest Missouri that is bringing fiber to rural communities. This project is a total of 400 miles of fiber optic cable serving two different town exchanges. The first exchange was a town called Parnell it has a population of 190 people, the second exchange is for a town called Ravenwood, it is bigger than Parnell with 440 resident’s living inside the city limits. There are two other exchanges involved to complete the 400 miles but they are being constructed by another