The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been prioritizing rural broadband deployment lately, as a big part of Chairman Ajit Pai’s push to close what he refers to as America’s digital divide. That a divide exists is hard to deny. According to the FCC itself, 97 percent of Americans in urban areas have access to high-speed fixed service, while only 65 percent of rural Americans can say the same (and on tribal lands, that number drops to 60 percent).

A big part of the reason why a lower percentage of the rural population has access to high-speed service is the economics of laying fiber. Simply put, it costs less to lay fiber along downtown city blocks than to string fiber between ranches that are miles apart. And given that a ranch will almost always have many fewer users than a city block, the return on investment for rural areas rarely looks enticing to service providers.

To incentivize rural broadband development, the FCC on Friday announced that it will invest US $20.4 billion over the next decade to close the digital divide. That money will come from multiple initiatives, including a reverse auction that has already allocated close to $1.5 billion to allow providers to bring broadband to more than 700,000 rural locations in 45 states. The FCC has also established the Mobility Fund, which will provide $4.5 billion over ten years [PDF] to bring 4G LTE wireless service to rural areas.