By John Hargrove PE TX – COO and Co-founder of Evergreen Technology Solutions LLC
If you’re reading this from a city where your kids can stream their homework, your grandparents can join a virtual doctor’s visit, or your job doesn’t care if you work from home—take a moment and ask yourself: What if you had to live in Yellowpine? Or Broaddus, or Rosevine, or Wrights Settlement?

Because if you did, you’d understand why I’m writing this article.

You’d understand the ache of watching opportunity pass your community by—not because your people don’t work hard, but because the systems built to help you were never designed with you in mind.

The Reality on the Ground

For 30 years, federal and state programs have promised rural broadband:
CAF I.
CAF II.
RDOF.
ReConnect.
Capital Projects Fund.
BEAD.
Billions of dollars. Thousands of pages of applications. A dream that still hasn’t reached the places that need it most.

If those programs had worked, this article wouldn’t exist.
If they had worked, children in Broaddus wouldn’t have to ride into town and sit in the school parking lot just to upload their homework.
If they had worked, a wife, mother, and grandmother in Buna would not have had to pray for simply 5/1 Mbps internet just to work via VPN.
If they had worked, small businesses in Yellowpine wouldn’t be folding for lack of digital reach.

They haven’t worked. And we know why.

Top-Down Doesn’t Touch the Dirt

Programs designed in Austin or Washington, D.C. don’t touch the red dirt and pine canopy of Deep East Texas. They don’t see the utility pole that ends a half-mile before the last three houses on the road. They don’t understand what it means to “have bars but no signal,” or to live five miles from a cell tower and still have no service because the terrain and trees get in the way.

Funding mechanisms today are designed for efficiency, not impact. They reward providers who check boxes on paper, not the ones climbing towers and mapping every mile of forgotten road.

When you live in a place like Rosevine, programs like RDOF and Community Connect aren’t just ineffective—they’re insulting. They assign census blocks like jigsaw pieces, assuming “served” means any part of the square is covered, even if it’s just the post office on the corner and not the hundred homes up the road. That flawed mapping disqualifies entire communities from ever being considered again.

And what happens when companies win big money to serve those jigsaw blocks and walk away, like we’ve seen with RDOF defaults? Nothing. Not to them. But to us? We wait another five years.

Zip Code Discrimination and the Hidden Divide

We don’t like to say it out loud, but zip code technology discrimination is real. If you live in a rural zip code, the invisible doors to capital, infrastructure, and progress close a little tighter.

We call it a “digital divide,” but let’s be honest—it’s a digital wall. And unless you’re lucky enough to have a local champion who’s stubborn enough to scale it, your community stays stuck on the wrong side.

Where Hope Comes From: Libraries, Locals, and Small Companies

Here’s what gives me hope.

In towns like Buna, San Augustine, and Pineland, libraries are becoming digital hubs. Not just book lenders, but broadband launchpads. They’re taking risks, forming partnerships with small, mission-driven ISPs like Evergreen Technology Solutions, and doing what the big players won’t: showing up.

With a $15K grant and some sweat equity, the Buna Public Library and Evergreen lit up 3 square miles of high-performance public Wi-Fi in 2023—before a single dollar of BEAD money landed. They launched telehealth rooms, digital kiosks, job training, and gave small businesses a reason to stay.

This wasn’t a press-release program. It was people-powered.
It didn’t take a billion dollars. It took belief.
It didn’t come from Washington. It came from within.

And they did it because they had something every good rural solution needs:
– A trusted anchor (the library)
– A committed local ISP (small business)
– A few stubborn innovators who believed in their community

The Missed Lesson of Electrification 

To understand why rural broadband continues to fail in 2025, we need to go back nearly a century—when the United States faced a similar challenge with rural electrification.

In the 1930s, only 10% of rural homes had electricity. Urban areas lit up at night, modernized with appliances, and surged forward in productivity, while rural communities were left in the dark—literally and economically.

That changed with the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, a bold federal initiative that didn’t just offer grants—it offered long-term, low-interest loans to local communities and cooperatives. These weren’t giveaways. They were investments—structured to be repaid over 30 to 40 years, often at interest rates as low as 2% or less.

What made it revolutionary wasn’t just the money—it was the trust.

Washington didn’t pretend to know every back road and holler. Instead, it empowered locals:

• Rural cooperatives were formed by farmers, preachers, mechanics, and small-town business owners.
  
• Communities pooled resources, made collective decisions, and took ownership of their infrastructure.
  
• The result? By the 1950s, nearly every rural home had electricity—and with it, access to modern life.
  

Fast forward to today.

Broadband is the new essential utility—but instead of learning from the past, we’ve built a funding model entirely backward.

Over the past 30 years, we’ve spent more than $30 billion on programs like:

• CAF I & II – which subsidized outdated copper and DSL
  
• RDOF – which left rural maps full of “served” areas no one can actually connect to
  
• BEAD and ReConnect – which promise more but deliver slowly, bogged down by eligibility filters, red tape, and top-down planning
  

These were grants—often awarded in large blocks to national providers with no real connection to the land or the people. They were based on flawed maps, impossible paperwork, and systems that prioritize compliance over outcomes.

And too often, they failed to deliver.

What if instead of pouring billions into these fragmented, unreliable grant cycles, we’d used those dollars to establish a Rural Broadband Loan Authority?

One that:

• Offered 40-year terms and sub-2% interest
  
• Prioritized local ISPs, co-ops, and anchor institutions like libraries and community colleges
  
• Required clear deployment standards, but left room for local design and adaptation
  

Just imagine: wherever electricity exists today in rural America, broadband could have followed—not as a luxury, but as a logical continuation of the same vision that electrified America.

Instead, we repeated the fragmented telephone deployment of the 1950s—patchwork providers, regulatory confusion, and inconsistent results.

We Need to Treat Broadband Like Power

Electrification worked because it treated rural people as worthy of infrastructure, not as charity cases or data points. It wasn’t perfect, but it honored a simple truth: when you give people tools and trust, they will build.

The digital divide isn’t just about download speeds. It’s about how we value rural people and whether we are willing to fund their future with the same courage and creativity we did nearly a century ago.

We did it once.
We can do it again.
But not with patchwork grants and quarterly announcements.
We need long-term capital, local control, and the conviction that rural lives are worth connecting.

It’s Time to Flip the Model

What if the next billion in broadband went to local providers with real plans, not just the loudest lobbyists?

What if libraries were seen as infrastructure?

What if we judged success not by “how many dollars were obligated,” but by “how many families got connected and stayed connected”?

What if decision-makers had to live in Yellowpine for just one year before signing off on funding formulas?

Closing Thoughts: This Isn’t a Tech Problem. It’s a Values Problem.

The broadband crisis in rural East Texas isn’t about fiber or gigabits. It’s about whether we truly believe that a kid in Sabine County deserves the same access as a kid in Austin. That a retired veteran in Newton should get the same shot at telehealth as one in Plano.

And whether we’re willing to let locals lead—people who know the land, know the needs, and are already doing the work. (not a multinational mapping company where no one has ever set foot in East Texas).

Until then, the gap will remain.

But for those of us still here, still building, and still believing—we’re not waiting anymore.

We’re connecting one household at a time.
We’re putting up towers ourselves.
And we’re proving, one signal beam at a time, that rural doesn’t mean forgotten.

Because we live here.
And that changes everything.