Oregon Director Must Tackle Numerous Challenges on the Route to Universal Broadband

Oregon faces a range of challenges on the route to making broadband available throughout the state, said Nick Batz, director of the Oregon Broadband Office (OBO). “Our biggest challenge is the size of the state,” he said. “We’re roughly the size of the United Kingdom but have six percent of the population. We have a number of mountain ranges and a number of rivers and valleys.” He also noted that there are areas of the state that have large chunks of lava rock just under the surface, making it difficult to bury anything, including telecommunications cabling, in the ground. While connectivity in population centers is “pretty good,” Batz said, it’s a different story in what he calls “frontier communities” – areas of the state where a person can drive long distances without seeing another car, but where the driver will pass isolated houses. Another broadband deployment challenge that Oregon faces is permitting, Batz said. Providers will need to get permits from the Bureau of Land Management, and that bureau did not receive any additional budget to handle the additional workload that government funding programs are expected to generate. The OBO also identified workforce as a major challenge to meeting deployment goals. To address that challenge, staffers have been exploring whether community colleges can provide appropriate training. Broadband mapping also has been a challenge. The office is one of several that have said that they weren’t able to file availability challenges to the Federal Communications Commission's map.