Imagine you’re a senior citizen in the midst of the pandemic. You don’t know how to book a vaccine online, so you’ve been on hold for hours. Or imagine you’re a small business owner, eager to expand your business. You invest in a new point-of-sale system to streamline your payments and launch a website to attract customers outside of the state. But it turns out that your town does not have strong enough internet to process a credit card transaction. These scenarios are part of what has come to be known as “digital equity”—a term that captures the issues of high-speed internet (“broadband”) availability, affordability, adoption, hardware, and education.

Affordable, high-quality broadband is not a luxury or a nice-to-have, but a necessity. Broadband access is linked to everything from housing values to economic development, educational gains, telehealth, civic engagement, public safety, and quality of life. This became especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government’s recent financial commitment to broadband—defined by the government as speeds of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload—acknowledges this to be true.

A year ago, Congress passed the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which allocated $65 billion for broadband deployment, affordability, and education. California is slated to receive the largest allocations of funds—an estimated $3.5 billion—because the state has a major connectivity disparity: Though over 90% of residents have access to the internet, that percentage drops precipitously in rural, remote, and tribal areas. According to one study, only 76% of rural residents have adopted broadband. Other estimates place the rural broadband gap at upwards of 51.3%.

Fortunately, however, California is also one of the best-situated states to tackle digital inequity.

The Infrastructure Act’s broadband funding is divided into three major parts. First, there’s $42 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which will fund infrastructure development, such as installing fiber optic cables to homes and businesses. Next, the Affordable Connectivity Program subsidizes broadband subscriptions for low-income households. Finally, $2.75 billion are allocated for two different digital equity programs, which will fund workforce training, skill development, and digital literacy.

As the largest of the programs, BEAD is getting most of the attention. BEAD guarantees each state $100 million so long as they abide by certain requirements, like submitting a 5-year broadband and digital equity plan. After the $100 million per state, the remaining funds will be distributed according to the number of unserved locations as determined by the Federal Communication Commission’s new national broadband map. California’s estimated $3.5 billion share—which will be matched by nearly $2 billion in industry dollars—will be directed towards the 6% of the state deemed “unserved” or underserved. This will probably include places like Central Valley (20% un- or underconnected) and Los Angeles County (19% un- or underconnected).

There are three aspects of California’s broadband readiness that set an example for other states: the middle-mile, rural partnerships, and “dig once” policies.

Middle-mile connectivity is an often-overlooked element of broadband deployment. Where the “last mile” connects a customer to their Internet Service Provider (ISP), the middle-mile is made up of high-capacity fiber lines that connect a provider to a core hub—often in a larger city—and other network hubs. Without these middle-mile facilitates, ultra-fast broadband to homes is impossible, because the local data has nowhere to go. In California, the lack of a robust middle-mile has been particularly vexing for Native nations. Matt Rantanen, director of technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association, has said, “the hard part is getting off the reservation to get to everybody else.”

In 2021, California passed Senate Bill 156, which provides a staggering $6 billion for broadband deployment, much of it focused on the middle-mile problem. Even better, the 10,000-mile project that the bill supports is open-access, meaning that any provider can use the network. This will substantially reduce costs, especially for remote and Tribal areas, which are often overlooked in deployment planning. Construction of the network began in October 2022 in San Diego County, and the entire network is slated for completion in 2026.

Piggybacking off this unprecedented commitment to middle-mile infrastructure, California has devoted resources to forging partnerships with rural communities. Since 2021, the Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC) has been working to develop open-access, last-mile municipal networks across the 39 participating counties. In April, 2022 they announced a partnership with Utah-based UTOPIA Fiber to deploy the first round of the project.

The RCRC project is unique in two ways. First, like its middle-mile cousin, it is an open-access network, which will allow multiple ISPs to sit atop it and offer retail broadband. Second, it’s possible that the networks will be placed under local governance, either at the municipal or county level. In communities across the country—from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Ammon, Iowa—local oversight of broadband has proven to be more responsive, accountable, and committed to community concerns and needs.

Finally, California is one of the few states in the nation that has legislation requiring “dig once.” Dig once refers to policies that encourage coordinating construction projects and broadband installation to avoid redundant digging and unnecessary spending. The 2021 Assembly Bill No. 41 requires the California Department of Transportation to ensure that any new highway construction “includes the installation of conduits capable of supporting fiber optic communication.”

Despite these advantages, achieving digital inclusion and equity in California will still be challenging. One challenge is the number of cooks in the broadband kitchen: the Public Utilities Commission, Caltrans, the California Emerging Technology Fund, California Broadband Council, Office of Broadband and Digital Literacy, and California Department of Technology and its newly established deputy director for broadband and digital literacy or “broadband czar” all have a voice in broadband planning in the state.

Another challenge is one faced by numerous agricultural states: mapping broadband to farms. The FCC’s new broadband map omits farm broadband. But in a state that represents 46% of the nation’s fruit and nut production, getting high-speed connectivity to California farms (and knowing where it is already!) is crucial for the future of agriculture.

Despite California’s substantive financial commitment and its innovative “dig once” policies and rural partnerships, it will still be a few years before that remote small business owner or senior citizen sees improvement in their digital lives.

The digital divides of access, affordability, and education will not be solved overnight. But the steps the state has already taken are a good indication that it knows broadband is a must-have for a 21st-century life and is prepared to bring it to all Californians.

The post Can California Bring Everyone up to Internet Speed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I glimpsed one answer to that question while driving to Deuel Vocational Institution, between the San Joaquin County cities of Tracy and Manteca. The demise of Deuel, which shuts at the end of September, is more than just the first closure of a state-owned prison in a generation. It also opens a prison window on the future of our landscapes, and on the peculiar predations of California progress.

Heeding my phone’s directions from Oakland, I exited I-205 at Tracy and followed Grant Line Road out to the prison. En route to that human warehouse, I had to navigate a thoroughfare lined with another breed of warehouses: massive logistics facilities for our nation’s retailers.

On Grant Line, I encountered two Amazon warehouses big enough to blot out the sun, distribution centers for Home Depot and US Foods, and huge facilities labeled with the names of third-party logistics companies NFI and APL. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had a major regional distribution warehouse there, too. And very near the prison stood the largest of all the warehouses, still under construction (its eventual occupant undisclosed), appearing twice as tall as all the others.

By the time the road forked right and I could see my destination, the 68-year-old prison seemed small.

This juxtaposition of older prison and newer logistics facility is not just about zoning and geography. It’s a changing of the guard, and of the guards. Just as that Old Testament prophet Isaiah foresaw the beating of the swords of war into ploughshares for agricultural cultivation, 21st-century California realities point to a new prophecy:

Out with the mass incarceration, in with the mass commerce.

Two different trends, both accelerated by the pandemic, are working together here. The first is California’s rapidly declining prison population—reduced to less than 100,000 in recent years by court rulings, sentencing reforms, and early inmate releases to limit COVID’s spread. As a result, the state has been ending contracts with private prisons and moving to close some of its older state-owned prisons.

The second trend is the surge in internet commerce, which has produced a surge in warehouse construction on the cheaper land in edge cities and along rural highway corridors where many of our prisons were built.

In recent months, as I’ve driven to California prisons that are targets for possible closure, I often find myself struggling to locate the correctional facility among seas of logistics facilities. A typical example is the state prison most in need of closure—the criminally expensive-to-maintain California Rehabilitation Center—which is hidden behind an ever-growing swarm of warehouses off I-15 in Norco, in Riverside County.

But the intersection of prison and warehouse involves people, not just land.

Prisons disproportionately house poorer and non-white Californians—the same people that warehouses disproportionately employ. Indeed, new warehouses are often the rare places open to hiring people with criminal records—and more so in recent years, with progressive attitudes toward ex-offenders coinciding with a growing shortage of labor.

But there is a dark side to warehouse employment: working inside these facilities can feel like prison. Employees are under intense surveillance and monitoring. They can be punished or fired for taking time away from work—even for rest breaks or to go to the bathroom.

So, state lawmakers, who in previous years wrestled with conditions inside prisons, are turning to the question of how to make warehouses feel less like prisons.

Earlier this month, the California legislature approved AB 701, a bill with first-in-the-nation regulations of warehouses. If signed into law by the governor, the bill would require disclosure of how companies surveil and monitor their employees.

Warehouses would have to disclose the quotas and algorithm-based metrics on work speed they use to judge workers. Companies could no longer penalize their workers for “time off tasks,” including going to the bathroom. The bill also requires the state to adopt new regulations to help reduce the high rates of on-the-job injuries in these warehouses.

Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s sponsor, has expressed particular concern about an Amazon warehouse being built in Otay Mesa, on the east side of her San Diego-area district. That facility, and similar warehouses, will neighbor existing correctional facilities, including a notorious immigration detention center (which the ACLU is trying to close), and the Richard J. Donovan Correction Facility, the only state prison in San Diego County.

Back in Tracy, on my drive down Grant Line Road, I tried to enter a couple warehouse facilities to talk to workers, but the places were too well-guarded. Accessing the closing prison was far easier. The old guard house, where visiting cars have to stop, was empty. And the entrance gate of the prison itself was wide open, with the inmates having already been relocated. After looking around the property, I helped staff carry out some computers for re-use by probation officials.

Standing there, it was not hard to imagine this old prison site—and those of the other 11 state-owned prisons that are at least a half-century old—being repurposed for warehouses.

It became even easier after I drove 25 minutes up to Stockton, where the last state prison closed in 2003, the Northern California Women’s Facility. But I couldn’t find the site. Its former address lies amid distribution centers and a massive intermodal facility for logistics, where cargo is switched from trucks to railcars (or vice versa) on its way from warehouse to warehouse.

The post Out With Mass Incarceration and in With Mass Commerce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.