A home satellite dish is attached to the roof of a home in Bruin on Dec. 6. Cary Shaffer/Butler Eagle

Hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line for broadband accessibility improvements, and Butler County can get its slice of the pie — so long as we can prove a need.

We all know it’s an issue.

If you’ve ever gone unprepared to the North Washington Rodeo in the summertime, depending on which cell service you use, you likely found that you wouldn’t be meeting up with your friends very easily. Your phone might have become as useless as a brick.

Here at the Butler Eagle, we’ve told the stories of people in Worth, Lancaster and Muddy Creek townships who experience slow internet speeds and often a loss of service for periods of time. For those living in these areas with limited or no service, the problem is ever-present.

And we know firsthand the struggles our reporters and photographers have when trying to file their assignments from various parts of the county.

Broadband accessibility is undoubtedly a problem here.

The latest press release from the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority mentioned $200 million in grant funding for the cause.

But to get any access to the funding, we must prove the need to fix it. Butler County must do the work of telling the stories, explaining the issues and making the requests to resolve problems.

We’re thrilled to see the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission (SPC) hosting a Regional Broadband Summit in Cranberry Thursday.

It’s a huge step in the right direction — and a huge step toward getting everyone on the same page. Doing so is our best shot at resolving broadband-related issues for all parties, so that we establish what the problems are and identify solutions.

The Thursday event will bring county and local government officials, nonprofits, school district leaders, local internet service providers, telecommunications companies and members of the public together to talk about the state of broadband across a 10-county region in southwestern Pennsylvania, including Butler County.

We’re looking forward to what comes out of it.

— TL