GOOCHLAND, Va. (CN) — In the rolling Virginia hills about 30 miles west of Richmond lies a high-end beer maker called Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewing. Since 2013, Lisa Reynolds Brotherton and others have gotten together to make a beverage they were proud of out of ingredients they grow themselves.
“You’re seeing farm lands disappear in Virginia, so how do you create an economic model where [former farms and others] can make enough money,” said the businesswoman turned farm-owning craft brewer as she toured her facility Tuesday morning with Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger in tow.
“It looked like Mars before we built it,” she said of the hilly and sprawling, wildflower-lined paths which lead to a farmhouse housing half a dozen two-story brewing tanks.
“We won't have broadband for a few years and I can’t jump to a bigger brewery without that,” she adds.
Broadband, or high-speed internet over fiber optic cables or other reliable mediums, is out of reach for about 225,000 households and businesses across the state — including Brotherton, who uses patchy satellite internet at her business and home. The brewing machines all run on a network which relies on digital signals, and the in-house marketing as well as the content her customers generate for social media all need to get pushed out online somehow — something her current connection struggles to achieve.
But Brotherton was optimistic; while the last year and half of pandemic created a new wave of nightmares for her business, the passage of the American Rescue Plan by Spanberger and other Democrats in Congress offered new hope — and funds — to fix her broadband problem.
“There’s certainly a clear example of a model that can work,” said the Central Virginia congresswoman, whose district encompasses both suburbs and rural regions, of the nearly $2 trillion federal stimulus given to states and localities and creating a massive war chest to fight bad or unavailable internet nationwide. “State leaders have been working, local leaders here in Goochland have been working, and now we have realized, from a federal perspective, this is an important part of our recovery.”
And Goochland and the surrounding county, with about 41,000 unserved businesses and households, hopes its broadband will be a success story following the federal investment. This month, state lawmakers allocated $700 million in ARP funds specifically for broadband with the aim of expanding service which, in the wake of the pandemic, has proven to be uniquely imperative.
“There’s only one kind of business card, those who have emails on them,” said Blair Levin, paraphrasing former Intel chairman Andy Grove, about the importance the internet plays in the modern economy. A Brookings Institute senior fellow who worked under the FCC to develop the 2010 National Broadband Plan, Levin’s work was a roadmap for how important so-called universal connectivity — getting everyone connected to the net — was 10 years ago. He argues it has only become more important since.
And while he jokes the coronavirus has been a better marketer of universal broadband than he was since he found little support from lawmakers for the effort a decade ago, he’s glad to see his work come to fruition even if it took such a dramatic event to inspire it.
“In an economy marked by work from anywhere, the presence of broadband for all kinds of purposes — hospitality or otherwise — is pretty significant,” he said.
“It’s about funding connections and getting a start,” said Gary Wood, president and CEO of Firefly Broadband, a service provided by the nearly 100-year-old nonprofit electric utility Central Virginia Electric Cooperative. He said his outfit was ready to connect the 41,000 unlinked locations for about $100 million, a level of investment his organization couldn’t have fathomed without the influx of ARP funds.
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