On May 21, 2018, the current FCC
Chairman Ajit Pai and former FCC Chairman under President John F. Kennedy,
Newton Minow, coauthored an article in The
Boston Globe titled “In
rural America, digital divide slows a vital path for telemedicine.” Many
rural Americans have limited access to local health care services, but
telemedicine - the delivery of health care services using communications
technology - helps bring those services into rural areas. The problem is that many
rural Americans also lack sufficient broadband access.
As I stated in a
March 2018 Perspectives from FSF Scholars
titled “Reaching
Rural America: Free Market Solutions for Promoting Broadband Deployment,” the FCC's ongoing initiatives to reduce
regulatory barriers and allocate and assign more licensed spectrum will encourage broadband providers to deploy next-generation access in
rural and unserved areas. Moreover, the increasing capabilities of wireless
broadband technologies, like satellite, fixed wireless, and mobile wireless, will continue to advance the speeds and quality of rural broadband connections, thereby closing
the digital divide and increasing access to telemedicine for rural Americans.
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