FCC Commissioners' Statements on the 2021 Broadband Deployment Report

“From my first day as Chairman, the FCC’s top priority has been closing the digital divide. It’s heartening to see these numbers, which demonstrate that we’ve been delivering results for the American people,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “In just three years, the number of American consumers living in areas without access to fixed broadband at 25/3 Mbps has been nearly cut in half. I’ve personally met some of these consumers, from Mandan, North Dakota to Ethete, Wyoming. And over the last two years, the percentage of rural Americans without access to mobile broadband with a median speed of 10/3 Mbps has been slashed from over 35% to under 10%. Moreover, at the end of 2019, mobile providers offered 5G service to approximately 60% of Americans, a figure that is substantially higher today. These successes resulted from forward-thinking policies that removed barriers to infrastructure investment and promoted competition and innovation. I look forward to seeing the Commission continue its efforts to ensure that all Americans have broadband access. Especially with the success of last year’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase I auction, I have no doubt that these figures will continue to improve as auction winners deploy networks in the areas for which they got FCC funding.”

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said, "Since 2017, the FCC’s top priority has been to close the digital divide. And today’s report confirms that our efforts have enabled the private sector to build out high-speed Internet infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Indeed, the digital divide has nearly been cut in half since the end of 2016. All of these new connections have been enabled by common sense reforms to our infrastructure rules—reforms that allowed the private sector to build a record-breaking 46,000 new cell sites in 2019 alone, which is more than the combined number of sites previously built from 2015 through 2018. The FCC also worked tirelessly to free up the airwaves needed to power these new cell sites. Indeed, the Commission has recently made more than six gigahertz of spectrum available for licensed 5G services in addition to thousands of megahertz of unlicensed spectrum. I am grateful for the chance to have led the FCC’s wireless infrastructure reforms over the past three years, and I hope that the Commission continues to advance the proven and successful approaches to infrastructure and spectrum that are now delivering results in communities across the country."

"We are in the middle of a pandemic," said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. "So much of modern life has migrated online. As a result, it has become painfully clear there are too many people in the United States who lack access to broadband. In fact, if this crisis has revealed anything, it is the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big. So it confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If you want evidence this is not right, it’s all around us. There are people sitting in parking lots using free Wi-Fi signals because they have no other way to get online. There are students who fall in the homework gap because the lack the high-speed service they need to participate in remote learning. There are mayors in towns across the country clamoring for better broadband so their communities have a fair shot at digital age success. Across the country there are state authorities developing new plans, maps, and initiatives at the behest of their residents. Then there’s Congress, which took its cues from all of this, and just passed legislation committing $7 billion to new nationwide broadband efforts—and more is likely to come. What I take from all of this activity is that the job is not done. There is progress. But we have not yet reached all Americans. We have real work to do before we can claim that 100% of this country has access to broadband service. I dissent"

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said, "Over the last two years, I have decried the unwarranted victory laps these reports seem to spawn. Now—as tens of millions of Americans find themselves unable to access online school, work, and healthcare during the pandemic—patting ourselves on the back is particularly unseemly. My views on the flaws in the data and analysis underlying this Report are well documented, and I will not repeat them here. But I am compelled to note that this Report should not have been released at all. After the election in November, congressional leaders wrote to Chairman Pai to demand that the Commission stop work on all partisan and controversial items during the presidential transition. This item is both. Nonetheless, Chairman Pai declined to withdraw the Report as Commissioner Rosenworcel and I requested. His rationale—that the Report has no legal significance—is plainly inconsistent with the Telecommunications Act, which directs the Commission to take “immediate action” if it determines that advanced telecommunications capability is not being deployed to all Americans on a reasonable and timely basis. That determination should have been left to the next administration, which could have addressed the question before the statutory deadline. For this reason and the substantive reasons I outlined at the Notice of Inquiry stage, I dissent."