Blair Levin

[Commentary] While the public still has no more than a leaked plan and vague State of the Union statements of aspirations, it appears the Trump administration's proposed approach to broadband infrastructure will end up delivering little of the abundant bandwidth the country’s rural areas need to thrive in the digital age. The original source of the rural broadband problem is how the administration apparently proposes to divide total investment. The leaked plan creates various buckets, with each getting a set allocation of the federal dollars.

By 2020, North Carolina can claim the title of the state with the most gigabit communities. Thanks to the work of the North Carolina Next Generation Network (NC NGN) project, itself an outgrowth of the Gig.U project, as well as other efforts, competitive gigabit networks are being built out by Google, AT&T, in a number of its major cities including Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem, as well as a number of its smaller communities, such as Carrboro, Pembroke and Holly Springs. But such deployments are not reaching everywhere in the state.

With global displacement at record levels, policymakers and humanitarian organizations increasingly recognize the role communications technology can play in facilitating protection solutions for refugees, both in transit and at destination. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has documented how mobile and Internet connectivity, specifically, enable refugees to remain safe, access health and educational services, build livelihoods, and keep in touch with families and communities. Yet significant gaps in broadband access, adoption, and usage mean that refugees are often less connected than host populations, many of which face their own connectivity challenges. Refugees living in rural areas, for example, are twice as likely as the global rural population to have no network coverage at all. And more than one-third of all refugees live in an area without the 3G network coverage needed to browse the Internet, use most apps, and conduct video calls.

This policy brief draws on its authors’ diverse experiences—working to assure refugee protection, developing the U.S. broadband plan, and analyzing the economics of broadband networks—to propose a framework for the creation of a global broadband plan for refugees. Through careful scoping of localized challenges and alignment of refugee connectivity efforts with host-country broadband strategies and market forces, such a plan holds the promise of improving the connectivity of the world’s more than 21 million refugees and the communities that host them.

[Commentary] As the White House and Congress develop an infrastructure plan promised during the campaign, many, including senators, House members and mayors, are urging that broadband be included. Here are eight simple ground rules we hope Congress will follow in crafting broadband-related infrastructure incentives:
1. Limit and carefully control direct investment funds.
2. Don’t offer ongoing support.
3. Use market mechanisms where possible.
4. Extend “Dig Once/Climb Once” policies on government property.
5. Improve government processes that hinder private investment.
6. Embrace emerging technologies.
7. Address nonfinancial causes of the digital divide.
8. Use the bully pulpit to encourage digital want-nots.

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is finishing an “incentive auction” of broadcast spectrum by which it created a market to match the price at which broadcasters were willing to sell spectrum with the price mobile operators were willing to pay. A bipartisan group of House Commerce Committee members described the outcome this way: “The incentive auction’s conclusion with more than $19 billion in bids marks the end of the second-largest auction and years of successful work in bringing market forces to bear on spectrum use policy. … Not only did the auction successfully encourage investment and competition by bringing 70 MHz of licensed and 14 MHz of unlicensed spectrum to meet our nation’s wireless broadband needs, but it also generated $7 billion for deficit reduction.” How did such a success occur and what lessons does it bring to today’s environment? Three stand out.

First, begin with a clear problem statement and generate bipartisan support for solving the problem.
Second, the solution should flow from a process that is transparent, fair, invites all to share credit and incorporates insights from a spectrum of stakeholders.
There’s one more lesson that might prove more controversial, though it shouldn’t. That is that smart, data-driven economic policy will create far more jobs and economic growth than ad hoc, stunt-driven events.

[Blair Levin is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Project]

With the Trump Administration dangling the prospect of a $1 trillion infrastructure program, now is the time to consider whether a new approach might more effectively address the rural broadband problem.

As a starting point, Congress should consider setting aside some portion of a new infrastructure fund, say $20 billion, for a one-time rural broadband acceleration fund that is expressly designed to make the Federal Communications Commission’s universal service program more efficient. Under this option, a rural area currently without a network capable of meeting the FCC’s 25/3 Mbps benchmark would be eligible for funding. The FCC would set an opening per-location amount for how much it would be willing to pay a carrier in one-time support to deploy a next generation network providing enough bandwidth to meet the upper bounds of future expected demand (for example, a symmetric 100 Mbps) within a set time frame. An express condition of the support would be that the FCC will not provide any ongoing funding in the future. If companies recognized this is their best chance to finance a “future-proof” solution, the aggregate of funds sought by the carriers would likely be substantially in excess of the available targeted fund. If this is the case, then the FCC would run a reverse auction, with firms bidding to receive a lower per-location amount in each round until the amount reached the available targeted fund.

[Commentary] The federal government has often played a major role in the country’s infrastructure development. With a President who promised federal support for improving infrastructure, we will soon see how the new administration proposes to do so. Based on their approaches to markets broadly, the new administration’s broadband policies are likely to lead to significant deregulation, tax changes, and merger activity that will affect the private sector’s appetite for infrastructure-related investment.

Still, infrastructure deployment is largely dependent on the efforts and policies of cities. In the early part of the last century, cities were the gravitational center for efforts to create the electrical, water, sewer, transportation, and lighting infrastructure required for economic growth and social progress in that time. Subsequently, while telephone service was largely addressed at the state and federal level, cities dealt with the deployment of cable networks and the cellular towers. In the last decade cities have been at the cutting edge of creating a more hospitable environment for deploying gigabit capable networks.

[is the third in a trilogy of blogs discussing the state of broadband policy as a new administration and Congress begins.]

[Commentary] If affordable and abundant broadband is integral to the continued growth of the American economy , then how the market reacts to Trump administration policy will determine whether the country can deliver this necessary infrastructure. Here are the four major areas where I expect the Trump administration to impact broadband policy and my predictions for how those reforms may look:

Expect a change in how the government considers the competitive landscape
Expect a change in the range of government oversight
Expect a change in the center of gravity from the FCC to Congress
Expect an increase in mergers and a change in merger reviews

(This is the second of three blogs discussing the state of broadband policy as a new administration and Congress begin.)

[Commentary] Building broadband infrastructure, as with any infrastructure, raises three questions: how to finance it, what projects are eligible to receive the funding, and how the funds are distributed. I can think of seven potential approaches, none of which are exclusive and many of which are complementary:

Target anchor institutions—schools, libraries, health facilities, and other community institutions—to assure they have abundant bandwidth.
Target middle-mile facilities—the networks between the internet backbone and the local, final connection– to lower operating costs for multiple providers in low-density areas.
Target final-mile facilities, with a focus on communities that lack access to a network offering a certain speed threshold. One could build on the Federal Communications Commission’s current Connect America Fund structure to accelerate a next-generation buildout in rural areas, something I’ll discuss in more detail in a future post.
Target next-generation 5G mobile networks and the Civic Internet of Things to bring intelligence to the water, sewer, electricity, and transportation grids underlying our communities. Both these new platforms will share a need for, and operate over, a fiber network. The infrastructure fund could accelerate such deployments either through a model cities approach of funding demonstration projects or by funding many projects to create scale and standards.
Target digital enterprise zones. The new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai recently proposed to use broadband to improve the economics of areas of persistent poverty. Pai deserves praise for both prioritizing government resources to attack poverty and laying out a detailed proposal. While I have my questions on the specific proposals, I support the direction Pai articulated and hope any infrastructure plan adopts his agenda.
Pursue a state block grant strategy. Distributing the funds through state block grants that rely on a formula, such as per capita funding, may prove a productive path, particularly if the states have broad discretion for eligibility.
Pursue a city block grant strategy, but rather than distributing the funds on a per capita basis, as with states, funds would be distributed to target cities that adopt certain best practices of deployment.
(This is the first of three blogs discussing the state of broadband policy as a new administration and Congress begin.)

While Congress continues to pursue legislation, we think there’s direct action the next Federal Communications Commission Chairman can take on day one that would immediately improve the quality of public debate on pending agency action. And that is to hold a second monthly meeting, during which FCC staff gives presentations on major items that might be brought before the Commission at least 60 days before any vote. This second, forward-looking monthly meeting would provide the public--the real party of interest—the information needed to provide meaningful input to the Commission prior to its decision-making. It would also improve the Commissioners’ own ability to respond to policy recommendations on an informed basis.