Generation West Virginia Community Spotlight

When it comes to internet access, West Virginia is one of the least connected states in the country, coming 50th in Broadband Now’s annual rankings of internet coverage, speed and availability.

Annie Stroud — Broadband Director for Generation West Virginia — wants to change that. As part of the organization’s mission to create more opportunities for young people to live, work, and prosper in the Mountain State, she is leading work in 18 countries to improve access to affordable internet through the Appalachia Digital Accelerator.

Over the past three years, Generation West Virginia and partners have done planning and supported communities to access funds to build this infrastructure. As we spoke in mid-November, Annie had just received a thick study with maps, data, and strategies that will help counties across the state build and expand broadband networks.

With the foundational piece in motion, Annie is looking beyond internet infrastructure to other barriers, such affordability and skills, that must be overcome so people in West Virginia have meaningful connectivity and all that it enables.

Generation West Virginia is unique among its Appalachia Digital Accelerator peers, advancing broadband in not one or two, but in 18 counties. This work builds on the groundwork laid by their partners at ROC and the robust planning efforts of the WV Office of Broadband.

Over the next 10 months, Annie and her team will support local partners to leverage existing planning work, fill the gaps, and work to secure the partnerships and funding they need to meet the digital goals of their communities. These counties were all classed as distressed counties by the Appalachian Regional Commission in 2023: Barbour, Boone, Braxton, Calhoun, Clay, Fayette, Gilmer, Lincoln, Logan, McDowell, Mingo, Nicholas, Roane, Summers, Webster, Wetzel, Wirt, Wyoming.

As Annie embarked on the project, she spoke with us about the region’s needs, the challenges and opportunities she sees, and advice for others doing broadband work.

Read on for a summary of our conversation.

Broadband infrastructure is fundamental, but not the whole story.

Laying out the need in West Virginia, Annie emphasizes that while reliable broadband infrastructure is fundamental, you can’t wait until it’s built before you think about what else people will need to connect and actually benefit from internet access.

“A lot of people are going to get connected over the next few years. So now people are starting to say, OK, when broadband does become available, how do we make sure people can access it, use it, benefit from it”

She talks about the importance of affordability, access to the right devices, and digital literacy, as three essential legs of the digital equity stool.

“If it runs by your house and you can't afford it, it doesn't matter what device you have. You're still not using it.”

Affordability is a key challenge in rural West Virginia, where mountainous terrain makes deploying and operating broadband networks expensive. Add unemployment and high poverty and it's clear that subsidies like the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and BEAD, the US government’s flagship broadband infrastructure investment, will be critical to delivering universal internet across the state.

The economics of broadband need an all-of-the-above approach

ISPs are being asked (and subsidized) to build in communities where the economics wouldn’t normally fit within their business model. To make these networks sustainable, Annie explained, the service ‘take-rate’ must be high. That means making sure people all have digital skills and devices to benefit from a connection. Without these, they aren’t going to pay a subscription fee month after month.

“Think about an ISP that builds down a long road to five or six households. If only one family subscribes, the provider is probably not going to be able to maintain that on like $70 a month from that one household — nevermind that the mom runs a home business and her kid needs it for school.”

Making sure everyone has the skills and tools to use the internet is critical to boost subscriber numbers and make the infrastructure economics stack up. Digital equity isn’t a nice-to-have — it keeps the lights on.

People in West Virginia deserve more

As with a lot of services and resources, West Virginia has been historically short changed when it comes to resources to bridge the digital divide.

Annie said other than the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which gives low-income families a $30 discount on their monthly bill, she could think of no statewide programs supporting people to get online and use the internet.

“I don't even know if there's anyone doing device distribution statewide right now.”

There are champions committed to this work, but they need more support. Annie mentioned the head of a public library who wanted to run a device program but her staff didn’t have the digital skills needed to help library users get set up with devices and troubleshoot problems.

Even if staff were given the training, they face other challenges. Until recently the library was severely limited by its internet connection, getting download speeds of just 10 Mbps — a connection too slow even for a single household.

“The librarians had to go upstairs and get people off of YouTube, so they could check out books.”

And this library is in one of the state’s biggest cities.

Communities are getting it done

Just as there are gaps, some places have punched above their weight, showing that with the right partners and resources, we can get this done. For example, Richwood, WV had fiber eight years ago because the local mayor was passionate about it and made it happen.

The task now is to make fast internet the norm, where it is too often an outlier in rural Appalachia.

Part of this, Annie says, is about recognizing the huge disparities that exist between counties in their capacity to do broadband work. While some counties have local teams that are used to managing large infrastructure projects, others have no capacity at all.

Broadband advocates have to be industrious, figuring out where counties have overlapping interests and can act together, where strategies can be duplicated, and where additional support is needed. The Appalachia Digital Accelerator is designed to make this support available.

Moving beyond planning to building

A lot of broadband planning work has been done through bodies like the Regional Planning Development Council, the WV State Office of Broadband, and ROC (Regional Optical Communications). Together, they have been deeply engaged with communities in planning for BEAD, providing a critical link for what’s going on on the ground.

But all the data gathering, community engagement, and planning of recent years comes with a downside: people are planned out.

“A lot of communities are really sick of planning. Historically, people have been told ‘Here's your plan. Now you can get resources!’ And then nothing happens.”

To be successful, Annie says this work can’t be more of the same. Her team is instead focused on working with counties on actionable implementation strategies with baseline data, demographics, and tools they need to secure grants and partnerships to get broadband networks built.

Meet communities where they are

A constant thread through our conversation was the importance of meeting communities where they are, starting with how you talk about broadband.

“We talk about digital inclusion and bringing people into the digital world. But we need to be better at explaining what that actually means. What skill are you gaining? What will this enable you to do? Conversations should be less philosophical and more practical about how internet access will improve your life.”

Once people are bought in, the work has to be tailored according to local resources. Whereas some communities will have committed steering groups, dedicated staff time, and GIS mapping skills, others will have none of the above.

“When you're working with a bunch of communities with different levels of resources, you have to be flexible enough to meet them where they are to make your program useful for them.”

One of the most important things to get right, Annie said, is building the right partnerships, particularly with regional planning organizations, councils of government, and the planning structures that exist in your state.

“Even if broadband work starts at the grassroots, you do have to work through some of those more bureaucratic agency structures because it’s infrastructure. In the past I’ve done a lot of local food system planning where there’s a lot of little scrappy organizations putting together plans and getting stuff done. It’s different with broadband. You have to build the lines of communication between the local organizations and the regional bodies.”

Demonstrating the power of connecting the dots between the right partners, Annie pointed to Mingo County, West Virginia where the local electric utility was laying fiber to connect its substations. They saw the opportunity to connect homes at the same time so reached out to the public service commission and spun up a project in partnership with a local ISP. Now some of the most rural, low-income communities in West Virginia will be connected to affordable lightning speed fiber internet because the right partners came to work together.

The success in Mingo underlines Annie’s point about the importance of flexibility and being ready to make full use of the capacity, partnership, and existing assets that already exist in a community.

Building from human networks to broadband networks

Before we said goodbye, Annie left us with her burning priority as Generation West Virginia embarks on their broadband work in 18 counties:

“We need to build strong relationships now because then people will have trust. And when there’s trust, there’s momentum. And when people see this as real, and not just another planning process being done ‘on them’, they will run with it. That’s when something's actually going to happen.”

Learn more about the work of Generation West Virginia.

The Appalachia Digital Accelerator is a Connect Humanity project in partnership with the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which contributed $6.3 million (80% of the total project cost).