For most of this century, Ohio governors have talked up the need to bring high-speed internet to Ohio’s rural and underserved communities.
State officials hope a massive federal initiative that’s set to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Ohio later this year could accomplish what officials have failed to achieve.
Ohio is slated to get $793 million from a bill former President Joe Biden signed in 2021 as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. When it arrives later this year, the money will add to the $300 million Ohio has sunk into broadband expansion since 2021, the year after the coronavirus pandemic highlighted how badly the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who lack local high-speed Internet options had been left behind.
The money is for building the infrastructure that makes the Internet work – cables, poles and data centers. The state’s roll out has been slow, but officials in the state agency focused on the issue – BroadbandOhio – say their efforts have made or soon will make high-speed internet available to 108,000 households, or about 324,000 people. They say 130,000 households, representing roughly 390,000 people, will still need to get connected.
Slow internet still leaves too many underserved in digital age
Randy Bramos of Hillsboro, a town about an hour east of Cincinnati, is among those who have gotten connected thanks to the state initiative. Bramos, who works out of his home for his family’s tree-management company, pays South Central Power Co. $153 a month for two accounts that bring top-of-the-line internet. It replaced his former internet provider, which he said required him to continuously restart his router so he, his wife and his kids could all get online at the same time.
“Especially now, during the summer, it’s one of those things you need to survive,” Bramos said.
Bramos represents the thousands in Ohio whom state officials describe as underserved in the digital age – having an internet connection that’s slow and fails to meet modern needs.
Mobile hotspots serve those with no at-home internet access
Then there are those who are unserved – those without internet or with offerings so slow they’re not even considered to be broadband. Thousands fall into this group, particularly in Northwest Ohio and the state’s Appalachia region. In Athens County, thousands of people go to library branches each month to log on to the Wi-Fi, including long-haul truckers and home health aides filing logs for work, according to library system Director Nick Tepe. The county library system also offers 130 mobile Wi-Fi spots that patrons can check out for 14 days at a time.
“They are insanely popular,” Tepe said.
The combination makes the library system a key way people get online in lieu of the ability to do so at home.
Tepe said people in the county are aware of government broadband expansion programs but are frustrated with their slow pace.
“It feels like it’s fair to say that there’s a certain sense down here that looks like, ‘Well, this is what has always happened to us down here in Appalachia, Tepe said. “We get promised a lot, then nothing comes of it.”
The long road to bridging the digital divide in Ohio
In 2020, state officials said that 300,000 Ohio households – representing up to nearly 1 million people – lacked a local high-speed internet option.
Most of these households were in rural areas in Northwest and eastern Ohio — places where there isn’t enough population density for private internet companies to recoup the cost of building an expensive fiber-optic line. The hilly terrain of Appalachia also poses a unique issue, since it makes lines more expensive to build and, for some wireless internet systems, radio signals harder to broadcast.
That’s why Gov. Mike DeWine started BroadbandOhio. The agency launched in March 2020, coincidentally just as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded.
DeWine wasn’t the first governor to tackle the issue. Former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland started his own broadband program, Connect Ohio in 2008. That initiative, like the current program, was federally funded and spent years trying to develop a reliable map showing where the state’s broadband gaps were.
Existing maps – developed using data reported by providers – were considered to be wildly inaccurate, a longstanding barrier for officials trying to target where to prioritize building and how to measure their progress. The data was provided by internet service companies, which were reluctant to share their information with competitors.
But the office ran out of funding in the 2010s and eventually closed.
Pandemic refocuses attention on digital divide
DeWine’s broadband office aimed to centralize the existing state initiatives working on the topic. Fueling it is hundreds of millions of dollars of state and federal funding made available during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic triggered a mandatory shift toward virtual work, school instruction and doctor visits. The inequality in high-speed internet access forced the issue to policymakers’ front burner.
In 2022, BroadbandOhio, with funding approved by state lawmakers the previous year, awarded $232 million in grants to 11 companies to connect almost 44,000 households the following year. The money was set aside to pay for projects in Appalachian counties: Adams, Athens, Belmont, Brown, Carroll, Clark, Clermont, Columbiana, Fayette, Franklin, Gallia, Guernsey, Hancock, Hardin, Harrison, Highland, Hocking, Jackson, Jefferson, Lawrence, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Muskingum, Noble, Perry, Pike, Ross, Scioto, Vinton and Washington.
The following year, the state approved a second round of funding worth $94 million in western, northern and northeast Ohio.
In exchange, the companies were given several years to build fiber-optic networks that residents in a set number of households could pay to access. The state released the money in stages based on completed work, and companies faced a penalty if they didn’t finish their projects on time.
State grants seed new start ups
Some of the grants were awarded to established players. But the funding also helped seed a new cadre of startup rural fiber-optic internet providers. This includes JBNets in Galia County, which started as a computer-repair company before it started offering wireless internet in the 2000s. Another is ConnectSCP, an affiliate of South Central Electric, a rural electrical co-op based in Athens that decided to expand into a new business.
“That really gave us the foot forward to be able to start with a fiber build out, and it’s kind of taken off like wildfire from there,” said Candi Denny, the chief operating officer for JBNets.
Telephone poles prove to be a hang-up
But like the federal program, bureaucratic delays initially slowed the rollout of the state broadband program. The biggest one is a decidedly low-tech slice of classic utility hardware: telephone poles.
In October 2023, Ohio’s largest internet provider sued one of its largest power companies. In a complaint filed with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, Charter Communications, which owns the Spectrum internet brand, accused American Electric Power of slow-walking its requests to string Spectrum’s fiber optic lines through AEP’s wooden utility poles, saying the indecision was crippling one of the state government’s top policy priorities.
Charter wrote that at the time the lawsuit was filed, AEP had approved only 14,298 of the 86,115 requests the internet service provider had submitted, with each request taking an average of 357 days to get processed. Charter, as a result, was starting to butt up against state deadlines that required it to finish some of its work by summer 2024.
AEP shot back, accusing Spectrum of having “flooded” the company with an unrealistic volume of requests. The company’s monthly requests encapsulated enough poles to stretch to Phoenix, Arizona, and back, an AEP lawyer said.
One of the problems the program faced was that utility poles often need to be replaced to make more room for fiber-optic cables. So state lawmakers voted in January 2024 to set aside $50 million of Ohio’s share of another pot of federal coronavirus money to help replace utility poles, or to move utility wires underground where required, to try to speed things up. And it waved Spectrum’s late fees.
But by July 2024, only about $11,000 of the $50 million in pole replacement money had been spent. Peter Voderberg, the executive director of Broadband Ohio, sounded like a divorce attorney as he described mediating between the power and internet companies during a meeting of the Ohio Controlling Board, a state legislative panel that approves spending requests from the governor’s office.
“Everybody has an argument for why it’s everyone else’s fault,” Voderberg said. “But we’ve been trying to get past it, to get the right information to get the pole owners to respond to it so we can break this free.”
State Sen. Shane Wilkin, a Highland County Republican and controlling board member, said his constituents were frustrated to not have internet access.
“With all the things we can do and all the technology, it cannot be this difficult,” Wilkin said. “We’re talking wooden poles in the ground.”
Voderberg said during the meeting he expected the bottleneck would clear when construction season began that summer.
State program winding down as federal money looms
Charter Communications ended up dropping its lawsuit, saying the two sides had worked out a resolution. The larger pole issue seemingly has been resolved for now too, and BroadbandOhio has begun approving pole replacement requests at a rapid clip.
Earlier this month, the Ohio Broadband Expansion Authority, the government entity created to approve broadband spending, approved $18.5 million to replace and put underground utility poles in Belmont, Delaware, Union, Hardin, Clinton and Warren counties.
As the state has seen its program pick up speed, it’s now waiting for the federal broadband money to come in.
BroadbandOhio officials say the state will spend $793 million in federal money to connect the final 60,000 households that are considered underserved and 60,000 more that are completely unserved. State officials say these unserved homes are in the most remote, difficult-to-reach areas, which will make connecting them very expensive, an estimated $6,700 each.
They’ve also raised concerns that there will be labor shortages as all 50 states work to build fiber-optic networks at the same time. That could drive up prices or slow down the work.
But first, the money has to arrive.
How Elon Musk could figure into Ohio’s broadband picture
During last year’s election, Republicans described the broadband program as a classic example of government red tape, pointing out that four years had passed without anyone actually getting new internet connections. And in March, new U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced President Donald Trump’s administration was putting the program on hold as it considered how to rip out “pointless requirements” put into the program under Biden.
“We will work with states and territories to quickly get rid of the delays and the waste. Thereafter we will move quickly to implementation in order to get households connected,” Lutnick said in a statement.
State officials say they expect new federal guidance for the federal broadband money from the Trump administration’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration this July.
One major potential change could be giving greater priority to satellite internet, which supporters say can be deployed more quickly than the fiber optic cables that are the backbone of Ohio and other states’ internet network plans.
The change likely would benefit Starlink, the company owned by Elon Musk, who initially was a close Trump ally after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. The two more recently had a falling out triggered in part by Musk’s criticism of the president’s “big, beautiful” budget bill. Critics say satellite internet technology could leave rural residents with slower and less reliable internet in the long run.
The pivot also would be a major change for Ohio’s existing program, which for years has emphasized fiber-optic internet, considering it the industry gold standard.
DeWine’s administration declined to make broadband officials available for an interview, including to discuss the Trump administration’s potential changes to the federal program.
“Until that guidance is issued, it would be premature to speculate on potential impacts to Ohio’s program strategy,” Mason Waldvogel, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Development, said in a statement to Signal Ohio.
But State Rep. Laura McNally, a Youngstown Democrat who sits on a national broadband working group of state lawmakers, was less diplomatic.
“We’ve invested a shit ton of money. And we’re going to be throwing all that away,” said McNally, who held a news conference last month with the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents utility line workers who are installing the fiber-optic network. The union is urging state officials to not rewrite rules that favor Starlink or similar satellite technology.
The administration has made one major change so far: Trump in March terminated a portion of the broadband initiative called the Digital Equity Access program, under which the outgoing Biden administration had approved Ohio to receive $23 million just months before. The program was meant to help people who can’t afford to get online – such as providing discounted service, training or free devices – while directing states to figure out the specifics. Ohio’s program was targeted at a variety of disadvantaged groups, including racial minorities, military veterans, rural residents, former inmates and the elderly.
Trump described the program as “RACIST AND ILLEGAL” in a social media post preceding the cancellation.
Companies prepare to compete for federal funding
Rick Lemonds, the CEO of South-Central Power, called the federal broadband program a “fantastic opportunity” and plans to compete for it.
But he said he has concerns about some of the federal rules, such as one that requires companies to perform an environmental review of the new lines. Lemonds said this could involve studying the environmental effects of utility poles that have been in the ground for 50 years. He said there also is paperwork requiring the company to do things it’s already doing, such as ensuring it’s paying competitive wages.
He said he expects the state and federal government to sort it out over the summer.
“We’ll do our level best to do everything we can to take care of the program,” he said.