There’s no coincidence that urgency for high-end connectivity infrastructure emerged as a common theme at AT&T’s annual shareholder meeting held here Friday.
The company needs it, and the people need it.
That’s why the Rev. Jesse Jackson was invited to deliver the first statement from the floor at the meeting, making the case that broadband networking is critical in impoverished regions such as Appalachia, where many still must use dial-up modems if they are to connect with the world.
Until the nation receives equal connectivity, from big cities to small cities and everywhere in between, some will have trouble arriving at the same destination as others.
Make an argument against such a statement, and I’ll counter with examples from America’s history. Take traditional telephone lines, prominent in AT&T’s long history, as an example. America’s rural areas were the last to receive telephone services in the 20th century. Without the advantages of communication city dwellers had, residents of outlying areas often suffered.
The same case can be made for electrical lines, missing in many areas of the rural South until the 1930s, when the Rural Electrification Administration was created to deploy power to people and places that otherwise may not have gotten it for years.
That movement, of course, required government intervention. AT&T is no government entity, and neither are its key competitors. But as we’ve seen with the latest smart-grid infrastructure effort, some level of government intervention usually is required to get the right lines in the right places.
Fortunately, the federal government’s recent stoking of the smart-grid electric infrastructure movement in America largely has left deployment in the hands of private companies. It’s probably the one piece of the federal stimulus and bailout that came during the recession that I really like. The only negative is that it should have been done sooner to avoid problems.
Just look at how far the rural South came competitively once telephone and electrical lines were available so many years ago. By the 1980s, the disparity between metropolitan and rural areas had closed radically.
But one has to wonder if recent advancements, including broadband connectivity and smart-grid infrastructure being enjoyed in larger areas, won’t re-establish that great divide.
It happened before, and it can happen again.
E-mail David Magee at dmagee@timesfreepress.com.