it powers education and economy.

>> It supports our health and well-being.

It also connects us to our neighbors and to those we love.

Americans without Internet miss out on many of these benefits.

Roughly one in five American households aren't connected to the Internet.

That's a fifth of our country that is unable to fully participate in modern life locally this situation has been described as a 100 million dollar problem how to provide broadband Internet access throughout Allen County and tonight we're going to learn more about the work being done to expand broadband connectivity to underserved and underserved areas county wide and throughout Indiana.

And good evening.

I'm Bruce Haines.

Welcome to Prime Time.

With us today is Allen County Commissioner Nelson Peters who along with commissioners Richard Beck and Theresa Brown serve as both the executive and legislative branches of Allen County government.

The Board of Commissioners has also been actively involved with other local leaders on an Allen County broadband task force to ensure that all persons can access and use affordable, reliable high speed Internet to meet their needs.

And we welcome Nelson and we welcome you as well.

If you would like to give us a call any time during the conversation, please feel free to use that number with any questions or comments because Nelson, this is a big learning curve sometimes for folks when we say tonight we're going to talk about Internet speeds and connectivity and that's where you say where's the smile?

>> Try to walk me through all the instructions.

First of all, good evening.

Welcome.

>> But it's great to be with you tonight.

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to come and tell a little bit of our story and hopefully get the public your viewers engaged a little bit more in making things better in the Allen County in northeastern Indiana communities with respect to broadband, why don't we start with the largest question which you would think by now is more easy to answer than ever before.

But why is broadband connectivity so important?

>> Well, you know, you hit it right on the head not only in the United States are one out of five households not connected but that trend's very well and Allen County as well.

And so that means there are a lot of people who aren't talking to a lot of other people, a lot of people who can't use it for educational purposes.

A lot of people use it for gaming purposes.

A lot of people that can't use it for health care purposes.

We've got many people now that strive to work from home and with covid now about two and a half years old, we have learned so much in what it takes to to communicate or what's necessary to communicate and broadband is central to that entire discussion and so it is important certainly it has logistical challenges.

>> How did it find its way to the Allen County commissioner's office?

Well, interestingly enough, it's kind of a funny story but back in early twenty I had a superintendent, a former superintendent at one of our four public school systems who came to me and he said Nelson he said this is abhorrent.

I can't have my students educate themselves from learn at home days a day like today when many students were at home and having a need to get on the Internet and learn what it was their schools were were teaching, he said.

>> Additionally, my wife works from home and the connection is just absolutely horrible.

>> So we discussed the opportunity to develop what we call the broadband action team the best team here in in Allen County and I said Oh by the way, how about being the co-chair and I didn't really leave him a lot of choice but we got together and we decided that our mission was going to be to get to a point in 10 years where we could provide fast, reliable and affordable Internet to every home and every business in Allen County and out of that the the broadband action team was formed and that gets us to the next step and that broadband task force has a variety of of players and we can can share with folks graphically what that looks like as we move through but certainly came at the right time.

There is the website you'll see that slide again in a few moments as we move through the time together tonight but also for not just background purposes but this is an audience participation thing with the chance for everyone to help contribute data points to a very important map related to viable and variable Internet coverage can be it is one of the things that we may talk a little bit more about is one of the challenges that we currently face in L.A. County and everywhere else for that matter is getting an understanding of where some of the voids in broadband activity are in Allen County.

>> I mean you think intuitively that everybody has it, everybody's got their phones and everybody's got Wi-Fi connections.

But that's not the case as you mentioned at the outset and as I reiterated, there are one out of five homes that that simply don't have it.

And so what we've done is we've we've put together a speed test in in conjunction with the Farm Bureau who I would encourage every resident to to utilize you can get on the website that you just showed and what the speed test does is it provides data back to us and the data back to us allows us to better understand where some of the gaps in coverage may be and it gives us the opportunity to find out what speeds are available in those particular areas and how we might best employ various resources to fill in that gap and what we're seeing on the site now is that little rectangular box that just crept out of sight.

We pull it back down but it literally says that's where you can click there and across the the top of the graphic to where you can take this test and the result of that test is is one to show how your ups and downs are going.

>> Exactly.

Exactly right.

Initially the federal government said that if you had a speed of 10 over one 10 megabytes over one ten being the download speed.

So that's how quick somebody sitting on the other side of their computer will receive information and the one is how quick they'll be able to upload information.

>> And the federal government initially said that 10 over one speeds were sufficient.

Well, the fact of the matter is you cannot do very much with ten over one speeds so they then move to a standard that said twenty five download speeds over three upload speeds might be more sufficient and in order for anybody to qualify for any of these grants they had to at least provide for twenty five over three speeds.

But the fact of the matter is as you and I talked a little bit before the show with technology moving as quickly as it does twenty five over three is not going to get it for very long.

>> So we are shooting at a minimum right now at one hundred over twenty five speed.

So clearly that is over 100 times faster than what the original speeds that the federal government said were appropriate for grant promulgation were.

>> I was actually talking with the former mayor Richard recently who's out in San Francisco but actually has some broadband interests in the state of Indiana and I was talking to him about the one hundred over twenty five speed and he said if you are looking at anything less than one gigabytes beads and those are infinitely faster speeds than the one hundred over twenty five said if you're looking at anything less than that then you are terribly, terribly short sighted just because of the speed of technology.

So what the speed test does is that actually gives us the opportune in various locations to know how fast uploads are occurring, how fast downloads are occurring and it gives us the opportunity to to sort of chisel a solution for that particular area and that's the kind of data that I believe feeds into a national telecommunication Tientsin Information Administration program to the BEED program I think to to update maps nationally to try to show where the weaknesses are a map or so was I think the commission was talking of releasing a new map yet I think this week that was actually today although we have have yet to see it one of the one of the real challenges in tackling the broadband issue is to is to get an understanding a real understanding of where some of the voids are.

>> When the initial maps came out from the the federal government, there were a lot of things missing.

>> What they do is they look at a company like Heartland or EMC, like Comcast, like media, some of those and they will lay a map of what that various company says is the reach of their signal over the other map over another map and it becomes quite a mess.

>> Now the problem with what they've done up to this point is there's a thing called a census block that is a very small area of homes, residences, businesses and there are a numerous ones of them in Allen County.

>> But what they'll suggest is that if just one home in that census block can receive a signal, then everybody in that census block can and so they discount it as far as an area that needs to be covered .

>> Mm hmm.

And it's really, really problematic.

So the speed test allows us in real time to to sort of look at and look at their maps and say OK, is this real or do we have information that may be to the contrary that allows us to more quickly go out and deploy a Comcast or a Mediacom or a frontier or somebody like that for a specific fix?

I recall you made a comment a couple of months ago that sometimes underserved area would be presumed to be rural.

>> Right.

But not all underserved areas are outside city limits.

>> That's exactly right.

Underserve can mean a lot of things that can mean slow speeds but it can also mean unaffordable broadband.

>> And I remember when we first got into this I had a county council woman who came to me and she said don't forget the people in the city.

And I said Well why?

And she told me exactly that.

>> She says you are focused on the rural areas but there are so many people for instance in the in the 003 or the 006 zip codes in in Fort Wayne that struggle with finding the means to to afford some of the broadband offerings that are necessary in those areas.

>> Mm hmm.

And in trying to understand the sense of how much demand is exceeding supply when it comes to interconnectivity Internet connectivity, we don't have to go back so far the broadband task force your conversation with educators beginning before the pandemic during the pandemic we received additional context of what was taking place in Indiana when Lieutenant Governor Suzanne Crouch came to visit and had a chance to speak specifically about the state of Internet and broadband connection connectivity even at that time.

>> Let's take a look at what she had to say and then broadband and never, never have we realized how critical being connected is then during this crisis because our children are learning we have our Hoosiers that are using telehealth and then we have so many people that are teleworking and so having the ability to be connected to be able to do that has become a necessity not a luxury but an necessity here in Indiana back at the end in twenty eighteen.

Governor Holcomb announced a hundred million dollar investment in connecting Hoosiers all over our state and we know that access to fast, affordable, reliable broadband affects health care.

It affects education, economic development, quality of life.

>> It affects everything.

And so we also know that Purdue University that did a study back in twenty eighteen said there were five hundred thousand Hoosiers here in Indiana that were not connected and if all those Hoosiers are connected it would result in an additional one billion dollars to our state's economy.

So we know we need to get Hoosiers connected.

We have invested already twenty eight million of the hundred million dollar initiative connecting almost 11000 households and businesses throughout Indiana next several weeks will be announcing an additional seventy two million dollars in grants to connect even more Hoosiers.

But now more than ever it is absolutely critical that Hoosiers are connected here in Indiana, awareness of the problem going back that from 2020 here we are on the close almost of two thousand twenty two it is a long term solution so this is not going to be something that is instantly available once the ability to connect from border to border within an Allen County or within Whitley County or within a Wells County has a chance to take effect but will happen right.

>> As I said at the outset, we're really looking at a ten year program right now.

Now of course is going to have to be some tweaks and changes as we move through that continuum.

>> But I think it will take every bit of that time to to get us to the promised land, so to speak.

>> The lieutenant governor has has been an unabashed supporter of broadband and fixes in the in the state of Indiana.

You know, we've we have been the benefactor of a couple of their programs which have really, really helped the citizens in the in the Allen County community.

>> One of the things the state of Indiana did was put together a next level connection awards program and we were heartened by the fact that we were the we were the benefactor of about twenty five point seven million dollars of goodwill.

We dealt with companies like Locatable Heartland, our EMC, Comcast and and Frontier Communications to to get us connected through the lieutenant governor's program, get us connected.

>> What does that mean?

Well, we were able to hook about fifty one hundred homes and businesses in in Allen County that otherwise hadn't had broadband connectivity.

>> That was that was a huge, huge deal just to kick the program off the the lieutenant governor through through Okura has also developed an Indiana connectivity program which I think is important for your viewers who just don't have the connectivity that they need right now to better understand it is a program that allows individuals through a portal to go through the Indiana connectivity program and sort of match their needs with a specific provider who may be able to come out and directly serve their their problem their problem may be a little bit different than their neighbors problem but it still gives them a fix in Allen County we have gotten seventy two thousand dollars back to serve 18 households and businesses in that arena pretty much in the Liow Cedarville area.

>> But nonetheless these are people that didn't have Internet service before who now have it.

>> And this brings us back to hearing how we work through and by we this is a true public private partnership now really is where the public provides additional data that can then be leveraged through these funding programs, through these Internet provider opportunities so that everybody can literally meet at both ends and drive the silver whatever cyber stake into the into the ground and recognize that things are now available.

But this is going to take some effort to accomplish and what we need to do is is here again what it is that viewers can be doing to support your efforts while we're looking to see how to take in more of a dent out of the hundred million necessary to get us over the finish line.

>> I really think, Bruce , the key at this point is to take advantage of the speed test because that does help us identify where some of those gaps are.

As I mentioned before, there are two real challenges in tackling the broadband issue.

One is funding that we can talk a little bit more about later on.

But but the other is knowing exactly where those gaps are.

We may have just a small hole in the midst of a lot of coverage that already exists and if people will get on and if they'll they'll take that speed test, they can they can hop on the county's website just for expediency and and that's a way that Allen County broadband dotcom and there is a button that will allow them at that point to hit a take speed test and it will provide information to them and then that information will go directly into the state.

Who then is coming back to us and saying OK, here are the gaps you have, here are some other potential fixes.

>> So we can't do it without the public's involvement.

It's absolutely essential that they tell us where the gaps are by virtue of getting online and taking these speed tests.

If we don't hear then the only thing we can conclude is that the service is fairly decent in a particular area and in what time we we we have left we want to be sure that it's also understood that the website provides an opportunity to connect with a lot of the players that are there to support various facets of this initiative.

>> One of them being the Wi-Fi project in addition to Indiana Farm Bureau apparently having a role in being sure that those outside urban areas are connected and everybody can be there.

Actually the sponsor the test they are and here's an overview of the Wi-Fi project that is another way of trying to show how individual households can find a way to at least make their your case known home by home business by business to ensure that the connectivity issues, the questions are are being addressed.

53 percent of Americans found Internet essential during covid they probably also found it like you say for e-learning days and another thirty four percent found it important to have we've come a long way since this initial large luxury you know, thing like oh that's cute.

>> What's it called the Internet.

That's right.

Now we can't move without without it.

Absolutely.

You know, you look at what's happening in health care these days as an example people will complain I can't get a doctor's appointment for two, three, four months.

I've got an issue that needs addressed right now.

We'll tell medicine has become an absolutely huge thing.

You have more and more people and this is really more post covid because I think we learned a lot during that period who are actually able to work from home and many, many companies are finding that it's a lot it's a lot more efficient and a lot less expensive for them not to have to keep a storefront yet still get the things done that they can get done for .

>> Wayne and Allen County have been the benefactors of that very notion when we've been able to recruit people from New York who want to enjoy the cost of living of Fort Wayne and Allen County yet maintain their New York job, they can do that through Zoome or through teams or through you know, whatever it is they want to want to use education again a big one.

>> Yeah.

And in terms of economic development to and in terms of societal development to create community, we're trying to make the digital divide I assume narrower.

Exactly.

And to see it now as a basic right some have actually called it a human right to Internet.

>> Yeah.

And to to be sure that when we say all Americans that it's all Americans so we are as of today looking at give us your assessment of what you see coming down in the next several months that we can follow along with you.

>> Well, I think you know, to your point you can begin to look at Internet and broadband much as a utility, a street, a road water, the provision of electricity, those types of things and that's how many many people are looking at.

So you could see some zoning changes that may compel developers to provide for broadband in a particular area that's not connected right now.

You could look at zoning regulations that allow for easier access to rights of way for broadband providers and that type of thing.

But right now I think what we're looking at in the more immediate future is the bead program and that is the broadband equity access and deployment program.

>> The government through the president's infrastructure bill will be dropping about forty three billion with a B dollars on fifty states in the near future.

That is absolutely enormous.

>> Some earlier returns suggest that Indiana could receive about one point one billion dollars of that if you look at a divide by population alone, I would hope that would allow Allen County to receive somewhere in the eighty two hundred million dollars range.

Now whether that will happen or not I don't know.

We were anecdotally told initially that we had one hundred million dollar problem just in Allen County with respect to broadband 80 to 100 million dollars go a long ways towards solving that.

>> Yeah, and we will be following along whether analog or digital as we move from twenty two to twenty three to hope that all of this continues to to find its way indeed.

And yet once more let us share with you the website where you can find out more about some of the concepts and agencies about which we've been speaking this evening and also have a chance to participate in that very important test to understand how your speeds are and how we can all make for a better, faster, more integrated and Internet friendly part of Indiana and our country going forward.

>> Nelson, thank you very fast.

We have speed test here hold twenty six minutes going by way too fast.

>> Thank you so much Bruce .

Thanks for the opportunity and for everyone with prime time on Bruce Haines.

>> Thank you for watching as well.

Take care.

We'll see you again next week.

Have a good night