Work. Shop. Learn. Health care. Entertainment. The COVID pandemic made it clear how important internet broadband access is for all those things.

Deschutes County has places where people don’t have broadband access. There are also broader issues of reliability.

Where are the gaps?

The Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council brought in a consultant, Magellan Broadband, to look at it. The findings are scheduled to be presented to Deschutes County commissioners this week.

The gaps are generally what you might guess. The more rural the address, the less access to high-quality internet.

A broadband planning group formed at the request of the Legislature in 2021 recommended a 100 megabyte per second download and 20 megabyte per second upload speed as a minimum standard. Some parts of the county don’t have that — let alone the emerging standard of 1,000 megabytes per second, 1 gigabit per second.

Crooked River Ranch and Terrebonne, north of Sisters and south of La Pine are key access gaps in the county. The solution could be a project to bring in internet fiber. Wireless broadband could help.

There is also a need for more redundancy in the larger broadband system in Central Oregon, the report says. Think of it as two issues, the road and the system for controlling the traffic.

Most internet traffic to and from Central Oregon goes through Portland. A recommendation is that there be a fiber route to connect Bend to Salem. It would help build resiliency, in case anything happens along the Portland route. Another recommendation is that there be a local data exchange in the county — local routing of local network traffic — instead of counting on networks in Portland to provide it.

All of these issues won’t happen without money. But there is a recognition of the need at the federal and state levels.

Deschutes County needs to get organized to lure public and private investment here to make these things happen.

“This report is really laying the groundwork for us to be able to do that and help folks get connected to reliable, affordable internet,” said Shelby Knight, a resilience planner for the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.

But who is going to coordinate and lead the effort? Who is going to be assigned to get to work on the recommendations? Those are questions for Deschutes County commissioners to take on this week.

You can see the full report here: tinyurl.com/DCountyinternet.