From our research and what we’ve discovered, there seem to be four main conclusions to draw about the difficulty and breadth of this project. First, improving and expanding sustainable digital infrastructure requires a massive overhaul of the existing infrastructure. This is a large-scale undertaking and will have to be coordinated at the national level. This leads to our second point. One thing that will be needed to make this project work is a large increase in skilled technical workers in general.

As mentioned previously, not all regions of the country have a surplus of these kinds of skilled IT workers. It may be useful to sponsor or encourage training programs in areas where there is a skilled worker shortage. Third, the infrastructure that exists in some of these regions, like the Midwest, is already smaller and less efficient than the existing digital infrastructure elsewhere. This means we will need to pour extra resources into building up these regions sustainably.

This has to do both with digital infrastructure and local power grids. Finally, climate change will have to be taken into account as this new infrastructure is designed and built. Changing weather patterns and increasingly strong storms pose a threat to all infrastructure, and this needs to be part of the planning. In sum, expanding the country’s digital infrastructure can be done in secure and sustainable ways, but this will have to be a massive, collaborative process across the whole country. The hardest thing to accomplish will be the equitability of this expansion since some regions of the country have older or less developed digital infrastructure to begin with, and because much of the technology is privately owned.