Analysis

The last time the country faced an economic crisis, Congress saw broadband as a significant tool to jumpstart the recovery.

On May 12, House Democrats unveiled the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act. "We are presenting a plan to do what is necessary to address the corona crisis," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she announced the legislation.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance has returned with another puzzling attempt to discredit municipal broadband networks. TPA’s report offers 30 short case studies and there is no explanation of how TPA chose this odd subset of municipal networks. Yet they allege a failure of the network or failure to pay debt in only 9 of its examples.

A years-long headache for the Park Hill (Kansas City, MO) School District has finally come to a satisfying resolution that could benefit schools and libraries across the US. Since Feb 2018, Park Hill has wrestled with the federal government to obtain E-rate funding for a fiber project connecting several of its schools. On April 27, the Federal Communications Commission finally granted Park Hill’s E-rate funding request in a decision that also sets a good precedent for the larger community of E-rate applicants.

Rural telecommunication operators are taking on business and financial risks to ensure their communities remain connected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are providing free service and setting up free Wi-Fi hot spots, exposing them to cash flow risks. Setting up hot spots for school children to use while in the parking lot of a fairground is admirable, but this is not a sustainable model for rural operators or the community – and neither is the Universal Service Fund (USF) funding mechanism that only levies fees against telecommunication bills.

The problems with government-owned networks (GONs) for taxpayers and broadband consumers across the country with a stress on the the massive amount of taxpayer dollars being wasted as governments continue to build broadband networks across America. Taxpayer-funded broadband networks are rarely successful as they are poorly targeted and underutilized, oftentimes being sold to private companies for less than the cost of construction.

Many families now rely solely on their home connections to take meetings via video conference or help their children complete the day’s lessons, not to mention leverage telemedicine to safely visit the doctor. But for the poorest among us — those who once had the option to visit the local library or head into the office to get a reliable connection — the bandwidth available to them at home often isn’t enough.

In October 2019, the Federal Communications Commission released a Notice of Inquiry (NOI), launching its annual review to determine if broadband is reaching all Americans in a timely fashion. Back then, we examined the questions the FCC was asking and how they might color its decision.

This analysis explores, from an economic perspective, the effects of modifying and expanding the “contribution base”—the supply of financial resources for the Universal Service Fund—to include both voice and broadband connections. While the Federal Communications Commission has updated the way universal service funds are distributed to orient them more toward support of both voice and broadband services, the contributions system that pays for the FCC’s mission-critical USF initiatives continues to rely precariously upon a dwindling pool of revenues from legacy services.

Opensignal’s latest analysis demonstrates that 5G greatly improves the real-world speeds that users experience. And, even more significantly, 5G offers faster average download speeds than Wi-Fi in seven out of eight leading 5G countries. The US is the exception, where Wi-Fi continues to offer a small edge over 5G because of the large number of US 5G users connecting on widely available, but relatively slow, 5G networks that are deployed using low spectrum bands.