Nebraska Broadband Office says providers on track to connect state by end of the decade

LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – The Nebraska Broadband Office painted a positive picture for the future of internet access in the state at a public hearing on Wednesday afternoon.

It can be hard to even get out to parts of Nebraska’s grassy hinterlands, so imagine the strain of stringing miles and miles of fiber optic cable into an underground web, building a bridge between distant ranchers and the online world.

“I’ve talked about that for about the past eight years,” Nebraska State Sen. Bruce Bostelman said. “There’s a a critical need.”

Bostelman knows the problem all too well.

“Where I live, 32 miles from here, in order to do business, we either have to have satellite or, you know, direct line, mobile hotspot,” Bostelman said. “We don’t have high speed Internet.”

The issue is fairly simple to diagnose.

“Cost, cost,” Patrick Haggerty, the Nebraska State Broadband director, said. “It always boils down to cost.”

The solution, Haggerty said, proved a little more elusive. That is, until a wave of federal dollars cascaded in, spurring the state to create the office Haggerty runs.

“You get into parts of Nebraska, and there, houses are 10 to 15 miles apart,” Haggerty said. “So you’re you’re you’re building 30 miles of network for two houses as opposed to three miles of network for 1000. So the cost basis for the private providers just isn’t there without subsidy.”

Haggerty’s office, administering more than $400 million in federal support through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, gives out that subsidy: 75% for projects where broadband providers expand access to unserved or underserved customers. Haggerty said that as of July of last year, 110,000 customers fell into those two categories. At Wednesday’s hearing in the Capitol, he said the number is down to 70,000.

Haggerty said, if cost and timeline projections hold, those 70,000 locations will be hooked up to high-speed internet by the 2029.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re on the eastern side of state or the western side of state. We have the same problem,” Bostelman said. “And if Nebraska is going to grow the economy, then it needs to grow. And if we want young people to stay, all across the state of Nebraska, we have to have high speed internet because that’s where things are in business.”

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