Analysis

The time has come for Congress to establish a broadband credit—call it America’s Broadband Credit (ABC)—to ensure that people who can’t afford broadband can use broadband. The debate on whether broadband is a luxury or an essential connection to society is over. Broadband is critical, as Americans have now learned as they work, study, consult doctors, socialize, shop—and really lead their lives from home. But for too many, especially the newly unemployed, the cost of broadband service is not affordable.

Even before it announced that it would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Frontier had a well-deserved reputation for mismanagement and abusive conduct.

The Federal Communications Commission is signaling that broadband deployment is still a work in progress, but it’s progressing at a pace that does not require regulatory intervention to speed it up. It is a conclusion being challenged by critics of the pace of broadband deployment, who argue that old definitions of reasonable deployment should not hold in the new normal of a pandemic. As with everything else in the country and the world, deployment is now seen through the lens of a pandemic, which magnifies the longstanding issues with the quality, or lack thereof, of FCC data collection on

Rather than rendering network neutrality obsolete, the Covid-19 crisis reminds us why it’s such an important principle. The crisis shows that even in dire circumstances, internet companies can provide a neutral network. In Dec 2017, Net neutrality opponents claimed that regulating internet providers like telephone companies had hurt broadband infrastructure investment and that dropping the rules would spur more investment. Other critics warned that broadband providers needed to be able to prioritize certain types of content to prevent internet slowdowns.

In the past 6 weeks, over 30 million people in the U.S. have filed initial claims for unemployment insurance. At a time when we are asked to stay at home to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, many state agencies find themselves overwhelmed by the flood of claims, leaving millions with dwindling resources to pay rent or put food on the table or stay connected via telephone or broadband. A program at the Federal Communications Commission should be a lifeline to keep people connected.

The connectivity and services built by information capitalists have become too important to be left any longer without public participation in determining the rules they follow. Critical nature of these digital services warrants public interest representation in decisions about their practices. Here are four ideas to incorporate public participation in establishing the rules for the critical services of the information era:

INCOMPAS, the internet and competitive networks association, is urging the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a stronger approach to encouraging competition across all markets.

5G will make wireless connectivity more flexible and better able to be tightly integrated into different functions throughout the economy. Accelerating a secure deployment will be a force multiplier for growth. The private sector will lead the 5G rollout, but governments need to help. Agencies should leverage 5G for their own processes and encourage its use in their related industries. State and local governments should eliminate barriers to deployment.

Frontier Communications recently declared bankruptcy, following a history of increasingly unsustainable acquisitions. It also just missed its milestone for the Connect America Fund, which required the company to deploy obsolete 10/1 Mbps service to 80 percent of the funded locations by the end of 2019 in return for more than $1.5 billion in subsidies. Some 774,000 locations should have at least 10/1 Mbps service by the end of 2020 from a company Consumer Reports repeatedly finds to be one of the worst Internet Service Providers in the nation.

The Federal Communications Commission uses the Electronic Comment Filing System to receive public comments about proposed regulation changes. In May 2017, a surge of more than 22 million comments disrupted the system making it unavailable. We issued a Sept 2019 report with 136 recommendations for improvements in this and other FCC systems. The report was not publically released because it contains security information. This is the public version of that report—with the sensitive information removed.