Missouri’s Battleground for Community Broadband

Missouri is an agricultural sate, with farms covering two-thirds of the sate’s total land acreage,supporting an $88 billion industry. The sate’s large rural areas lack access to high-speed broadband. According to the FCC’s 2019 Broadband Deployment Progress Report, over half of Missouri residents in rural areas of the sate lack access to broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. The sate ranks 42nd in the nation for broadband connectivity, with over a million residents lacking any access to high-speed internet.