Remarks as Prepared for Delivery to the

Fiber Broadband Association

 

Good afternoon, everyone. It’s an honor to join the Fiber Broadband Association today. 

I’m Revati Prasad, and I lead the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. I’d like to believe that Benton is a household name, but just in case you’re not an avid reader of our newsletters and publications (which you absolutely should be), we are a 44-year-old nonprofit dedicated to telecommunications policy in the public interest. Our mission is to ensure that all people have the means of communication, of connection that positively impact their lives. 

That means we live at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. We are not a trade association, and we don’t lobby. What we do is help policymakers, practitioners, and communities understand what good broadband policy looks like. 

We translate complicated state and federal policy into plain English so everyone can understand what is happening and what the stakes are. We conduct research, publish case studies, policy analyses, and toolkits to understand what is happening in communities, what works to get people meaningfully online, and the tangible impact of policy. And we serve as a bridge between the two. In short, we help ensure that decisions about broadband policy are informed by evidence and communities, and oriented toward the public interest.

So the work you all do, building the internet infrastructure that none of us can do without, is critical to our mission and why I am here today.

This may sound a bit strange to all of you, passionate as I am sure you all are about conduits and pole access, but generally speaking, infrastructure is pretty easy to overlook. When it is functioning as intended, it operates in the background of daily life, largely invisible.

But infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks down: when a water main breaks, a power grid fails, or, god forbid, our Wi-Fi goes down. We are forced to recognize the essential role that infrastructure plays in our lives. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in March 2020, our reliance on internet connections skyrocketed. To “flatten the curve,” we distanced ourselves, trying to recreate our work and school and social lives entirely online. 

Unfortunately, for millions of Americans, that wasn’t possible. 

• Broadband networks didn’t (and still don’t) reach everyone.
• The broadband networks that reached people aren’t all equal. Some technologies [cough “satellite”] simply can’t offer the capacity and reliability of, say, fiber networks.
• Not everyone can afford broadband services. 
• Not everyone has the skills to use the internet. Especially, as the experience of being online feels more dangerous and disorienting (not for the faint of heart!). 

Congress recognized these inequities and set us on a path toward universal connectivity. Over $100 billion was set aside across a range of programs, making it the largest federal investment in broadband connectivity in U.S. history. $42.5 billion for the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. A number that big makes it easy to forget that Congress also allocated billions of dollars for Tribal broadband connectivity, the ReConnect Program, public-private broadband partnerships, rip-and-replace, the Capital Projects Fund, State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, middle mile networks, and private activity bonds.

Congress passed measures to ensure more low-income households could afford their monthly broadband bills, first through the Emergency Broadband Benefit and then through the Affordable Connectivity Program. The Emergency Connectivity Fund helped provide students with broadband connections and equipment. Congress also passed the Digital Equity Act, legislation backed with resources to invest in the human infrastructure of broadband,  the people and organizations who provide direct support to individuals to access, afford, and meaningfully use the internet. Add to this additional federal investments in telehealth, distance education, broadband mapping—and the only logical conclusion could be “Mission Accomplished,” right?

Unfortunately, some have already forgotten the hard lessons the pandemic taught us. As you all are well aware, under the new Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, NTIA made a number of changes to the BEAD Program this June in ways that fundamentally alter both its intent and its impact. The affordability programs expired, and Congress failed to act. The Digital Equity Act, which would have helped people USE these networks, was, quote-unquote, cancelled by tweet. All that progress, all that momentum, and we seem to be losing our way. 

Under Secretary Lutnick, NTIA has mandated that the BEAD program be “tech neutral,” which, in practice, has meant that hundreds of thousands of locations that were receiving broadband service only via fixed wireless technologies are no longer eligible for the funding.

NTIA also wants states to choose the cheapest technology, not the most durable, scalable, or appropriate one. In practice, stacking the deck against fiber.

Let’s talk real numbers and real impact:

Before these changes in June, West Virginia was going to use $946 million of its 1.2 billion allocation to deliver fiber to EVERY SINGLE ONE of its 110 thousand served and underserved locations. 100% fiber, still under budget. 

Under Secretary Lutnick, the state first lost 34 percent of eligible locations, so now they can only use funding for 73,000 locations. Of those locations, 94 percent will still receive fiber, and the remainder will get low-earth orbit satellite.

All these qualified as pre-price caps, and some changes are likely the result of fewer locations shifting projects around.

As a result of these changes, West Virginia is spending $625 million. Totaled across all states, NTIA’s changes have reduced BEAD spending to around $21 billion, down from the full $42 billion—but what’s $20 billion among friends?

Secretary Lutnick uses the phrase “the benefit of the bargain.” That’s his stated guiding principle —the benefit of the bargain for the American taxpayer. But today I want to ask—Whose benefit? What bargain? 

I want to talk to you about what federal infrastructure investments can and should do for our communities.

Example: Broadband Infrastructure Enables Community Revitalization

This is the Laurel Community Center in Madison County, Western North Carolina, a region appropriately focused on rebuilding after the devastation of Hurricane Helene. But the area has been grappling with a rural decline for many years before that. 

The Laurel Community Center was an abandoned elementary school closed due to low enrollment and a failing sewage system. The building sat idle for a few years, empty, underutilized, and symbolic of a town losing its foothold.

Today, it is thriving. It has recreational facilities, studio spaces for artists, and classrooms where they run an Ecology program or where you can take a quilting class (fiber 1.0). 

It also houses the Fiber Optic Internet Hub for the French Broad Electric Membership Cooperative. The cooperative received a USDA ReConnect grant to build a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to connect 4,056 people, 189 farms, 64 businesses, and two fire stations. Since French Broad uses the center to house their hub, the cooperative also provides campus-wide free Wi-Fi, an Internet Room open every day for anyone to come use the internet, and a technology lab where people can learn digital skills or take online classes. 

The Laurel Community Center is a perfect illustration of what smart, community-driven infrastructure can make possible.

Infrastructure Builds Some Futures

Infrastructure is necessarily about the future. 

First, it takes a long time to plan and build. Gratification is delayed—really delayed. 

And because of that long timeline, infrastructure does more than solve today’s problems; it creates the conditions for the future, well, not THE future, but A future, a particular future. 

Because the thing to remember is that infrastructure enables some futures and makes others harder, even impossible. 

A bridge that connects Point A to Point B brings those two places closer together. But maybe Point B once had essential relationships with Points A and C, and now that bridge inadvertently weakens the bond between B and C. 

I might have confused myself with this alphabet soup. Point being, infrastructure can redistribute opportunity, attention, commerce, and mobility, so design choices are deeply consequential. 

There is a famous story about the New York City planner Robert Moses. The story goes that he blocked public bus access to Long Island's beaches and parks by building low parkway overpasses (under 14 feet) that intentionally prevented public buses from using these roadways. The goal, the deliberate goal, was to restrict access for those without cars, often poor and Black people, to reserve Long Island recreation for the wealthy and white.

Infrastructure decisions are never neutral. They embed values into the landscape. 

In an example that hits closer to home, which neighborhoods still rely on copper networks, and which ones have been upgraded to fiber?

So when we talk about broadband infrastructure today, I want to emphasize that we are making choices that will shape who gets to participate in the digital future and who gets left behind. The discussion should not be simply about what technology we choose and where we put it, but also about who can afford it and who can use it. . 

Internet Infrastructure Must Be More Than Pipes And Poles 

When we talk about “broadband infrastructure investment,” the conversation often jumps immediately to the stuff we can see and hold—fiber routes, splice points, towers, conduit, poles. 

But fiber is, at the end of the day, just glass in the ground if the people and communities this infrastructure passes do not use this connectivity. “Infrastructure” is much more than pipes and poles; it is also people. 

Infrastructure matters only if people can access it, reach it, afford it, trust it, navigate it, and use it to improve their lives. 

Broadband is not simply a construction project. Physical infrastructure creates possibility. Human infrastructure turns possibility into reality.

Whether a librarian helping a veteran fill out an online benefits application at a public computer, a digital navigator assisting a senior citizen in signing up for affordable home broadband, a digital skills trainer teaching social media privacy in Spanish, or a device refurbisher helping students find devices to use at home—all comprise the human infrastructure of broadband.

This work, of making physical infrastructure usable and useful to people, is profoundly human. From helping people evaluate their options for broadband service and devices to understanding what they can learn to do requires direct interaction. These interactions require patience to explain (and perhaps explain again) how to do something that may have become second nature to many of us—and the humility to know that evolving technologies can leave us behind, too.

And investment in this human infrastructure is necessary to ensure a return on investment in the physical infrastructure.

Whether it is looking for a job or keeping in touch with family, the ability to access and use broadband is a core determinant of a person’s ability to fully participate in and advance in society. And although we’re investing tens of billions of dollars, these networks and keeping skills up to date will need to be an ongoing effort as technology continues to evolve.

Collective Benefit Must Drive Public Investment

This is not a small task I am laying out—I understand that. The scale of the challenge is precisely why public investment is indispensable.

Let’s take a step back and remind ourselves why we needed public investment in broadband in the first place.

First, broadband suffers from classic market failure. In dense, affluent areas, private capital works just fine. But in rural America, on Tribal lands, in low-income neighborhoods, or in communities with aging or inadequate infrastructure, the math doesn’t pencil out. The economics of broadband deployment mean that whole communities and millions of people are simply not profitable enough to serve.

But that doesn’t mean those communities don’t deserve access to modern infrastructure. It means the market, by itself, cannot deliver it.

That is where public investment comes in to ensure that the least profitable places are not left least connected.

Second, broadband is a collective benefit, so it requires collective investment. When we build or upgrade infrastructure, the entire economy becomes more productive. A fiber line run to a rural town doesn’t just help the household at the end of the driveway. It helps the school run its first virtual tutoring sessions. It helps health clinics offer telehealth. It helps local businesses compete. It helps the region retain workers and attract new ones.

These are spillover benefits—broad, diffuse, socially valuable, and impossible to fully capture through a monthly bill. You cannot charge someone a “community vitality fee” or a “your town didn’t die” surcharge. But those outcomes matter, and they emerge only when government steps in to build what no one else could.

There is also the sheer scale and coordination problem. We are asking to build networks that span mountains, hollows, reservations, coastal plains, towns with four homes per mile, and cities with 400. 

Finally, infrastructure investments are generational. The timelines are long; the payoff unfolds over decades. Fiber laid today will still be serving households for decades to come. You cannot finance generational assets with short-term expectations. This is exactly what public investment exists for—to match long-term benefits with long-term investment.

Put bluntly, the private sector is critical to deployment. But public-sector investment ensures that everyone benefits.

And that benefit—the collective benefit—must drive why and how we invest.

Public Interest Must Drive Public Policy

Once we acknowledge that public dollars are essential, the next question is: How do we ensure public dollars are spent wisely? 

This is where the public interest must guide public policy—not ideology, not political whims, not doing something “cheaper” at the expense of doing it right.

Our public policy decisions determine so much.

What technology gets deployed: Is it fiber that lasts decades, or stopgap technologies that’ll need to be replaced? 

Where networks are built: Do we serve the communities with the greatest needs, or just the ones that are easiest to reach? 

Who can afford service.

Who can meaningfully use the internet: access without the skills to navigate the online world is not real access at all.

Good policy sets us up for a shared future.

Bad policy locks in inequity for generations.

We are seeing the consequences of those choices play out in real time. 

When the guiding question becomes “What is the cheapest option?” rather than “What is the most beneficial, durable, and equitable option?”, the results are predictable: corners get cut, and communities lose out. 

And when President Trump calls the Digital Equity Act racist and unconstitutional in a tweet and “cancels” the entire program, or when Congress lets the Affordable Connectivity Program expire, the result is equally predictable: the people who need the most support are the first to lose it.

These decisions are not abstract. They determine who gets help learning to use technology, who can afford to get online, who can keep service when budgets tighten, and who can stay safe in an increasingly complex digital world.

Eliminating digital equity planning does not eliminate digital inequity. It only eliminates our ability to address it.

So let’s go back to Secretary Lutnick’s favorite phrase: “the benefit of the bargain.”

But let us also be clear about whose benefit? What bargain? And who gets to define both?

A bargain that delivers yesterday’s technology to the communities that need tomorrow’s opportunities is no bargain at all.

A bargain that abandons affordability programs while claiming fiscal responsibility ignores the enormous social and economic costs of disconnection.

A bargain that dismantles digital equity work raises the social and economic costs of leaving the most vulnerable offline. 

The real benefit of the bargain, one that taxpayers deserve, one we must demand, is a future in which every community has broadband infrastructure and the means and ability to fully participate in American life. A future where public investments build public value. A future where the networks we construct strengthen and not stratify our society.

Over the past few years, we have supported a number of state-focused coalitions dedicated to closing the digital divide. We’re active at the state level in Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and nationally through our State Connections working group for state legislators. Members run the gamut from elected officials to ISPs, from non-profits to trade associations, and from farmers to librarians. Each coalition is unique, but their general mission is to maximize the impact of federal programs and, where federal programs fall short, urge states to take action.

As you can imagine, it’s been a busy few years for the coalitions. On the positive side, we’ve been building partnerships between communities and ISPs for successful BEAD applications, ensuring stakeholder perspectives are reflected in program design and agency rules, throwing funding parties for digital inclusion organizations, and bringing coalition members to Washington DC and the halls of Congress.

On the not-so-positive side, we’ve been opposing what feels like an endless string of harmful federal decisions on BEAD, USF, the ACP, and the Digital Equity Act. In fact, just this morning we published a bipartisan letter from over 160 state legislators from 28 states calling on the administration to give states their non-deployment funds, as the law requires. 

We do know that BEAD remains a significant step toward—we’re still talking about millions of people getting high-quality service — but we worry that the federal government is relinquishing its commitment to closing the digital divide. That, for some people, “good enough” connectivity will have to be “good enough.” 

As responsibility falls to the states, our coalitions will be ready. So if you’re interested in bringing fast, affordable, usable broadband to every person in your state, I encourage you to connect with me to see how state coalitions can help.

And that brings us to the heart of the matter: Connectivity is about community.

It is about whether a rural town can rebuild after a hurricane.

Whether a senior can see a doctor without traveling hours.

Whether a student can learn, a worker can apply for a job, or a family can stay connected to one another.

Whether places like the Laurel Community Center—once abandoned—can become vibrant hubs of learning, opportunity, and belonging.

That is what the future infrastructure should enable.

That is the benefit the bargain should deliver.

And that is why every one of us—advocates, providers, policymakers—must insist that public policy serve the public interest.

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Dr. Revati Prasad is the Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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