Viewpoints
The combination of high-speed, reliable fiber, local quality of life, and inexpensive land is a winning strategy in rural America.
By: Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association (FBA)
Every household in America needs fiber, but most especially rural areas that otherwise have limited access to new and sometimes unforeseen economic opportunities. For city dwellers and policy makers that take their broadband for granted, rural households only need a cheap solution that delivers just enough.
One real-world example where fiber has opened up new business opportunities is on the northern edge of Texas Hill County, far away from the light pollution of big cities. The Coleman County Telephone Cooperative started deploying fiber services in 2019, leveraging Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Enhanced A-CAM funding and has now deployed over 1,000 miles of fiber passing 2,800 locations, replacing legacy copper with 21st Century connectivity.
This remote location has world-class skies for astronomy observations, providing a premier viewing experience with over 220 clear nights per year. But that remoteness is both a blessing and a burden, since few people have the resources or ability to travel there for any length of time, especially with an expensive telescope.
Starfront Observatories, launched a bit over a year ago, has managed to bridge the gap between remote location and year-round access with fiber, providing a telescope hosting service at scale for amateur and professional astronomers. There are currently 600 telescopes residing across six buildings with rollback roofs at the company’s site in Rockwood, Texas, with more under construction. When the sun goes down, the roofs roll back and the telescopes are remotely pointed at the nighttime sky, with every evening’s observations uploaded via fiber in real time to people around the world who want to explore the universe with their own equipment.
Each pair of Starfront buildings is supported with a dedicated 1 Gbps fiber circuit, plus there’s another separate fiber circuit for the on-site operations team and their needs. A single telescope can generate anywhere from gigabytes to terabytes of imagery every evening, making fiber the only broadband media capable of supporting the company’s business and its many happy customers from around the world. The vast amount of data uploaded to users makes this a business that just can’t be supported by wireless or satellite solutions, as the founders of the company will tell you early and often.
This business is a win-win for everyone. Astronomers of all types can remotely view the northern sky from the comfort of their own homes, rather than having to pack up all of their gear and travel to Texas or another remote location. Coleman County also gets jobs and the associated economic benefits from a booming services business.
Other businesses benefiting from Coleman’s rural fiber include General Leathercraft Manufacturing, which manufactures the Pioneer Fit line of powerlifting belts and accessories, and a Buckstop Truckware production facility that requires high-speed reliable connectivity to the corporate headquarters located in Oregon. For these businesses, the combination of high-speed, reliable fiber, local quality of life, and inexpensive land is a winner.
From the sky to the land
Fiber is also the key enabler for Physical AI, integrating machine learning and applied intelligence into hardware for fields such as agriculture, construction, mining, and municipal services. The data flow is a two-way and continuously more symmetrical street, with information from devices, machines, and cameras at the edge of the network moving to cloud-based solutions for storage, analysis, and insights for better productivity.
CES 2026, held in Las Vegas in January, hosted a broad range of non-traditional technology companies that are going all in on AI across their operations, with technology like voice-enabled services in the operator’s cab and technology that can coordinate the operations of fleets of vehicles on airport tarmacs, farms, and in quarries.
Many of us are familiar with large language model (LLM) cloud-based services, such as ChatGPT, but AI is not tied down to the massive compute-dense data centers being built by cloud firms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Instead, intelligence is being applied equally and more rapidly to the edge, into devices and machines for the proper balance of speed, safety, and productivity. For example, autonomous vehicles conduct local image recognition tasks necessary for control while uploading video to the cloud for logging, iterative improvement for training, and value-added analysis. Daily tasking, software updates, and new value-added features are a few of the things that take input from the edge and then are created in the cloud and downloaded to the edge for local processing.
Agriculture is one of many fields embracing and integrating AI into their operations across the board. Farming has always been a data-driven business, balancing the complexities of planting crops into the appropriate soil at the right time and then applying the necessary amount of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and other inputs to get the maximum crop yield possible at the lowest cost.
AI is assisting farmers at all steps of the process, with cloud-based tools ingesting data from IoT sensors out in the field, satellite imagery, and from high-resolution cameras on flying drones and autonomous tractors to monitor and assess crop health down to the individual plant if so desired. Test farm and historical data help to provide insights into what to plant, when to plant, how to treat the crop throughout its lifecycle, and finally when to harvest and ship to market.
Applied to farm equipment, the combination of AI and automation is providing a bump of 20% to 30% increased productivity to John Deere combines at harvest time, optimizing harvest operations in a way that a human being would be hard pressed to match in the first 5 minutes of operation, much less throughout a full day’s work in the seat. Since the combine is being used most efficiently when it is in operation, this translates to less overall runtime, resulting in lower depreciation rates for equipment and the getting the most use out of assets.
Regular software updates from John Deere have expanded combine automation optimization from the basics of wheat and other grains, corn, and soybeans to peas, lentils, and rice. Next year, the company will provide an upgrade kit so a combine can automatically adjust its auger to precisely fill an accompanying grain wagon while avoiding spillage. Since a combine offloads over 300 pounds of corn a second, missing the wagon literally means money spilled on the ground.
Further benefits of automation include a virtual console for farmers to monitor the status of their vehicle fleets, providing information on where each piece is at, what it is doing, and when it needs refueling and servicing. AI provides a predictive maintenance schedule to avoid field breakdowns, so the farmer gets the maximum use of the equipment when he needs it.
AI is also providing a computational boost to discovering new crop inputs that farmers need to control weeds and pests. Finding, understanding, and putting the next generation of crop inputs into production traditionally takes over a decade or longer, and at least $300 million to bring a new product to market.
Enko, an AI-informed crop health company, has built a machine learning discovery platform using DNA-encoded libraries to screen hundreds of billions of compounds for effectiveness against organisms such as plants and insects. Its proprietary platform identifies potential new compounds 75% faster and at 90% lower costs than traditional R&D methods, screening them for both safety and efficacy before they move onto more costly optimization for production and commercialization.
A continuously evolving future
There’s an ongoing discussion within the FBA’s precision agriculture committee as to what the farm of the future will look like, given the steady set of innovations being rolled out every year from an ecosystem of venture-funded startups, university research, and large corporations working to improve productivity, safety, and profitability.
The constant theme is that fiber to the farm is a necessity. It provides the reliable service and open-ended broadband scalability to support new innovations such as edge-based AI servers that provide real-time monitoring of cattle and crops, and next-generation high-speed Wi-Fi and 5G/6G networks for robust and easy communications with all the IoT widgets, machines, and autonomous vehicles that are coming into use across the United States over the next decade and beyond.
