When floods hit West Virginia in February 2025, McDowell County put out a call asking residents to complete an online form detailing their property damage. For many residents, that wasn’t an option. Even in the best of times, 1 in 5 McDowell households have no internet. With floods damaging cell towers and broadband infrastructure, the problem became far worse. For McDowell, a once-thriving coal county, the lack of broadband made it harder to demonstrate its urgent need for recovery aid.

Broadband has become essential to the survival of rural communities. Research shows that rural counties with high broadband adoption see 213 percent faster business growth and 44 percent higher GDP gains than those unconnected. Without reliable internet, McDowell’s businesses reach fewer customers, workers can’t access remote jobs, and students fall behind, deepening a cycle of economic decline.

McDowell County is not alone. In West Virginia, Kentucky, and across Appalachia, tough terrain and small populations mean internet service providers (ISPs) frequently sideline rural communities. And nationwide, 15 percent of US households—more than 48 million people—still lack high-speed internet.

The broadband gap is a solvable problem through financing rural broadband. The technology exists. What’s missing is the right financial structures to get investment where it’s needed most. Impact finance can be the bridge.

Why Public Investment in Financing Rural Broadband Hasn’t Closed the Gap

Broadband deserts exist largely because traditional finance and big-name ISPs do not build for communities too rural or too poor to hit their profit targets. Successive governments have responded with programs to attract providers to underserved communities, with mixed success. One hundred billion dollars in federal funding between 2010-2020 closed the digital divide by less than 1 percent. Why has so much money had so little impact?

First, these grants have too often funded technology that is obsolete by the time it is built. Take the Connect America Fund II (CAF II), a $10 billion Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program to connect rural areas with download speeds of 10 Mbps. By the time the program took effect in 2015, the broadband standard had been updated from 4 Mbps download/1 Mbps upload to 25/10 Mbps, leaving communities with outdated and inadequate infrastructure. Penn State Professor Christopher Ali calls this pursuit of short-term fixes “the politics of good enough,” repeatedly leaving rural and low-income communities behind. Instead of bursts of investment every five to 10 years, financing rural broadband and future-proof connectivity would offer far better use of tax dollars.

Read the full article about financing rural broadband by Brian Vo and Clara Miller at Stanford Social Innovation Review.