Letter to NTIA Assistant Secretary Roth on Closing the Digital Divide With BEAD

The key outcome in BEAD success is, as the text of the statute states and as Assistant Secretary Roth has made clear, bridging the digital divide. For deployment, NTIA’s restructuring policy notice took an essential step toward that outcome by making the program technology-neutral, eliminating extraneous requirements, and reducing the cost of the deployment component of the program. These reforms will be effective at ensuring cost-effective deployment of home broadband service to all locations in the United States. But the digital divide has both deployment and nondeployment components. As Assistant Secretary Roth has also stated, NTIA will administer BEAD with a laser-focus on the result of “clos[ing] the ‘digital divide’ once and for all. To achieve the key result of closing the digital divide once and for all, NTIA should enable BEAD funds to address broadband adoption barriers, including affordability, in targeted, efficient ways. Universal home-broadband deployment is an important step, but deployment is not the only, or even the largest, barrier to closing the home-broadband divide. In the same way that unserved households couldn’t get home broadband without deployment support, five times as many households can’t get home broadband without affordability support. Only 3 percent of households on the wrong side of the digital divide cite availability of service as the main reason why they are unconnected, while 15 percent of such households identify affordability as the main reason.