Analysis

The Virginia House of Delegates recently took up the issue of regulating the fees and the time it takes to get a permit to cross railroad tracks with fiber or other wire infrastructure. We rarely hear about the problems encountered when trying to cross railroad tracks, bridges, interstate highway underpasses, or parklands. Each of these situations can add both time and cost to a fiber construction project. There are lot more miles of railroads than a lot of people assume. In a rural area, the first challenge is often finding out who owns a given set of tracks.

The North Star of communications policy should be to make services faster, better, and cheaper for all. Yet, next year, about 50 million Americans could find that their access to the core communications service of our time—broadband—has become slower, worse, and more expensive, with many even likely to be disconnected. That shift would constitute the biggest step any country has ever taken to widen, rather than close, its digital divide. The reason for the potential debacle?

Technological innovation often leads to organizational innovation, and organizational innovation often leads to organizational opposition. As new forms of business organizations emerge and become dominant, interest groups and others often resist the change, decrying the new models as fundamentally negative. The reality of economic history is these new business models have been enormously positive. The world would be a vastly poorer place without the rise of the industrial organization, then the multidivisional corporation and now the Internet-based platform.

In my mind, infrastructure is an asset with a long useful life. If you assume that fiber is good for 40 years, the weighted average useful life of the a network is 53 years. If you assume the average life of fiber is 60 years, the useful life climbs to 65 years. Aerial fiber networks have a lower economic life without conduit, but the range of expected life is still between 37 years and 53 years. Other broadband technologies have a much shorter economic life.

Today marks the second anniversary of the American Rescue Plan Act. Funding from the law provided over $25 billion to jumpstart universal broadband access—including broadband connections for 16 million students through the Emergency Connectivity Fund for schools and libraries to close the homework gap.

In 2021, the South Carolina General Assembly established the Office of Broadband Coordinator within the Office of Regulatory Staff to serve as the central broadband planning body for the state and to coordinate with federal, state, regional, local, and private entities to encourage the continued development of access to broadband in the Palmetto State. The office was charged with convening a collaborative stakeholder process to identify challenges to expediting broadband access—and so it established the Broadband Advisory Council to help guide broadband planning in South Carolina.

Many cable companies boast about having more fiber than coax in their outside plant, and according to recent research from Omdia, those numbers are expected to dramatically increase over the next decade. “Forty-three percent of MSOs have already deployed PON in their networks,” said Jaimie Lenderman, Principal Analyst and Research Manager at Omdia covering the Broadband Access Intelligence Service. “It’s split between the largest and smallest providers. Middle-sized organizations are expected to deploy PON in the next 12 to 24 months or longer.” 

Several people have asked me recently if cellular companies will be pursuing Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants. Until recently, cellular companies didn’t have a product that would have qualified for broadband grants. BEAD and other grants are awarded to internet service providers (ISP) that serve homes and businesses, not cell phones.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) provides the primary subsidy available to cover broadband subscription costs for low-income households, but only 1 in 4 eligible households have enrolled in the ACP since it launched in 2021.

The US Department of Labor (DOL) is considering the essential role of digital skills and broadband in the workforce. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) emphasized that digital skills are key to digital equity in our recent comments in response to DOL’s Digital Literacy and Resilience Request for Information. NDIA’s comments highlighted models of digital skills programs operating within the framework of holistic digital inclusion strategies. NDIA emphasized five overarching points: