The Digital Divide: Why & How We Should Close It

Our Global Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Joni Roberts, was interviewed by Monica Sanders for an article published on Medium.com.

The article explores the concept of the “Digital Divide”, what it is, who it affects and how we can address it with technology, expertise and funding.

Much like Joni, I grew up in a rural environment and know how challenging lack of access to the latest technologies can be, so this is an area that very much resonates for me and helps inform my work at Ribbon.

Some quotes I found particularly interesting include:

“The main challenges we see with reducing the digital divide start with logistics and costs — accessing these mostly rural or remote locations is planning and resource-intensive, and subject to a number of regulatory and bureaucratic requirements. As a result, many Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers have stalled their plans to expand broadband service into these areas . . .”

 “The federal government is playing a key role in driving programs and funding designed to reduce the divide, such as the $14 billion Affordable Connectivity Program and the upcoming $42.45 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD), but I believe that we can drive more immediate change at the regional level.

Ribbon's Rural & Regional Market Solutions

Ribbon has a highly developed and focused practice on supporting rural and regional providers upgrade their networks to better serve their communities. We partner and collaborate with providers including cooperatives, utilities, tribal, municipal and more. These include Empire Access, Texas Lone Star Networks and Skyline Skybest  who have worked with us to upgrade their IP and Optical networks. With these higher broadband speeds and increased network capacity, providers can enable smart, modern applications in agriculture, manufacturing, telehealth and more.

I encourage you to read the complete interview. Joni’s personal story and how she got into the telecommunications industry is quite interesting. After growing up in rural Colorado, she got a Master’s in Telecommunications and joined the industry as one of the pioneering class of women who came on board in the 1990s, just as telecommunications embarked on an era of rapid change. And now she’s leading our global marketing department as a member of our Executive Leadership Team!

Additional resources

Ribbon’s Solutions for Rural Providers

Neptune – The Ribbon Family of IP Routers: Optimized for NPT XDR and AR WAN

Apollo – Optical Networking: High-Performance, programmable optical networks