“It was a constant battle to get people off that waiting list,” Labbé says. The demand was so great, she says, that they eventually received grant funding from other sources like the nonprofit TechSoup to get 25 hot spots. As the director of the town’s public library, she says there was a consistent 15-20 person line to check out one of six T-Mobile hot spots provided by Oklahoma State University in 2018. Teresa Labbé knows how important internet access is for the residents of Okemah, Oklahoma. But while the challenges are similar, bringing broadband to the countryside is more complicated. Now the same cooperatives that set up electricity want to add broadband to their list of services. Vahdatipour says rural broadband faces the same basic challenge as electricity: for-profit companies don’t want to invest. The federal government fixed that issue by setting up cooperatives to help rural residents pay to install poles and lines.
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