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Worried that $2 trillion law wasn’t enough, President Trump and congressional leaders converge on need for new coronavirus economic package
Congressional leaders and the White House are converging on the need for a new assistance package to try to contain the coronavirus pandemic’s economic devastation, fearful that a $2 trillion bailout law enacted in March will have only a limited effect. Democratic Reps are eyeing a package of spending increases that would “easily” cost more than $1 trillion, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. In a sign that lawmakers might be preparing to cut a deal, Speaker Pelosi has backed away from some of her recent proposals that Republican Reps found most objectionable, including a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.
Speaker Pelosi and Democratic Reps recently rolled out a host of more ambitious — and controversial — measures, including new federal workplace safety standards for health-care providers and the infrastructure plan. But Speaker Pelosi later said that those ideas might have to wait. “While I’m very much in favor of doing some of the things that we need to do to meet the needs — clean water, more broadband and the rest of that — that may have to be for a bill beyond this,” Speaker Pelosi said April 3. “Right now, I think that we have a good model — it was bipartisan, it was signed by the president, but it’s not enough.” The Senate has tentatively scheduled votes for the week of April 20, and the House leadership has also targeted that week for potential votes. But aides say the legislative schedule is entirely dependent on the course of the pandemic and whether the two chambers and Trump can come together on workable legislation.
Reps Rob Wittman (RVA-01), along with Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH-6), announced the Serving Rural America Act. This legislation would create a five-year pilot grant program at the Federal Communications Commission, authorizing $100 million a year for a total of $500 million over five years to expand broadband service to unserved areas of the country. The Coronavirus outbreak across the nation has further emphasized the need for reliable broadband access in every home in America.
- To be eligible, an internet service provider is required to partner with a locality, city, county, wireless authority, or planning district commission to ensure the needs and input of residents are included.
- Prioritizes funding to areas without 25Mbps/3Mbps.
- Includes important measures to ensure interagency coordination and safeguards against overbuilding of other federally funded broadband projects.
- Features a challenge process that allows the public or other existing service providers in the proposed service area to submit a challenge to the FCC, to determine whether the proposed project would duplicate existing broadband service in the proposed service area.
- Includes important measures to improve mapping including: analysis of third party data, crowd sourcing, and site specific testing in service areas where mapping data has been contested.
- Instructs the FCC to report to Congress annually on the progress of the program based on buildout data provided by recipients.
As schools, workplaces and public services shut down in the age of coronavirus, online connections are keeping Americans in touch with vital institutions and each other. But that’s not much of an option when fast internet service is hard to come by. Lawmakers want the federal government to send schools and libraries more money to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots to students. But the Federal Communications Commission says it’s not authorized to do that under current law and is discussing a solution with Congress.
On Navajo Nation, the country’s largest Native American reservation, it’s common to see people sitting in their vehicles at night outside local government centers, fast-food restaurants and grocery stores to connect to Wi-Fi. Diné College is lending laptops to students and asking internet providers to improve service. Digital-access advocates hope that this crisis propels the government to do more to get people connected. In some places, relief was expected later in 2020. But that’s too late to help with the current crisis.
Like most other aspects of life, the ongoing pandemic has disrupted the federal government’s plans to disburse grants, loans, and subsidies for the construction of rural broadband networks. But unlike the sporting events and concerts that can be put on an indefinite hold, these funds are now needed more than ever by the Internet access providers trying to connect rural households during a time when everything has moved online. Federal agencies, like the Federal Communications Commission and the US Department of Agriculture, must find ways to manage the challenges caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus and to leverage their funds to support essential networks for families stuck at home. These agencies’ main rural broadband programs — the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) and USDA’s ReConnect — are at different stages, both in their funding cycles and in their response to the Covid-19 outbreak. The pandemic has already led to changes at the USDA, which has extended the ReConnect application deadline and is set to receive additional funds from Congress. Meanwhile, the FCC has yet to alter the upcoming RDOF subsidy auction.
Your cable is out and you want the technician to arrive and help you? That might not be possible right now. Due to the coronavirus and social distancing directives, cable firms will still send out a technician as a last resort, but they might not enter your home. Cox Cable, which serves 19 states across the US, has stopped sending people for in-home visits, and instead has begun doing smartphone video conferences with customers, sometimes even from the truck outside their home, to troubleshoot. Verizon has also stopped routinely sending technicians to the home. It has limited installs to just medical emergencies and "critical" installations. For other customers, Verizon has moved to remote video chats, similar to Cox.
Verizon is one of numerous home-Internet providers offering temporarily free service to low-income households during the pandemic. But a big restriction on Verizon's offer makes it impossible for many people to get the deal. Verizon on March 23 said it would provide two months of free home-Internet and phone service for current low-income subscribers in the Lifeline program and $20 monthly discounts for new low-income subscribers. The $20 discount lowers the starting price for 200Mbps Internet to $19.99 a month. But the broadband offers are available only on Verizon's fiber-to-the-home FiOS service and not in DSL areas where Verizon never upgraded homes from copper to fiber.
Verizon said "our DSL service does not meet the Lifeline program qualification standard," referring to the 10Mbps to 20Mbps speed standards imposed by the FCC's Lifeline program, which reimburses ISPs for discounts provided to low-income people. But while the 60 days of free service applies to existing Lifeline customers, the $20 discounts for new FiOS customers apparently apply to low-income subscribers even if they're not officially using Lifeline plans.
Verizon is canceling many home-Internet installations and repairs during the pandemic, and some customers are being given appointment dates in Nov when they try to schedule an installation. The Nov appointment dates appear to be placeholders that will eventually be replaced by earlier dates. But Verizon is sending mixed messages to customers about when appointments will actually happen and about whether technicians are allowed to enter their homes.
Gov Bill Lee (R-TN) and Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bob Rolfe announced $19.7 million in broadband accessibility grants that will expand service to support 31,000 unserved Tennesseans in nearly 12,700 households and businesses. Grantees will provide $29.8 million in matching funds to complete the projects for a combined investment of $49.5 million across the state in this third year of the program. Infrastructure should be built out with customers able to sign up for service within two years of receiving the grant funds.
Consumers are adopting stand-alone broadband services at a much higher rate than just two years ago, and analysts predict that the economic downturn prompted by the COVID-19 outbreak will accelerate the trend. With a recession looming, consumers may look to cut pay TV service in favor of more robust standalone internet packages once they're free to leave their homes. The broadband boom driven by the pandemic is likely to continue even after the virus dies down.
After holding steady for five years, household adoption of stand-alone internet service rose to 42% in the third quarter of 2019, up from 34% in 2017, according to Parks Associates. The rise was largely driven by subscribers aged 18-24, who subscribe to stand-alone internet at a rate that is double that of older consumers. 45% of over-the-top video subscribers have an internet-only package, up from 39% in 2017. The average stand-alone internet subscriber pays $60 a month, a 36% increase since 2013.
Yes, but: Not all firms will have the ability to capitalize on the trend. Satellite companies like AT&T's DirecTV and Dish, which also provide pay TV services, do not have the same broadband strength to fall back on as their ISP counterparts like Verizon and Comcast.
Broadband consumption is showing indications of reaching a plateau in markets that have been “quarantined” against the coronavirus pandemic, according to the most recent data analyzed by OpenVault. Following three weeks of double-digit percentage growth, the total downstream data usage in those markets with shelter-at-home policies declined 5.80% during the week of March 30–April 3 when compared to the previous week. While total upstream usage continued to grow during the March 30–April 3 timeframe, the increase over the previous week was only 2.3%. Overall data usage growth in quarantined markets is 33.1%, when measured against OpenVault’s Jan 2020 usage benchmarks.
Among other daily usage trends:
- Average daily downstream consumption during the 9 am-to-5 pm business hours in the last week was 6.35 GB, 42.46% higher than the Jan level of 4.46 GB.
- Average daily business hour upstream usage rose 82.5% from Jan through April 3, from 0.215 GB to 0.392 GB.
- Overall, daily usage grew from 12.19 GB in Jan to 16.22 GB through April 3, indicating a new monthly run rate of more than 480 GB per subscriber during the current crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic has driven millions into their homes and forced them to rely on the internet to maintain vital connections with family and friends. But it has also laid bare an underlying problem: spotty, sometimes non-existent wireless service in rural areas – including some places in Madison County (IN) where officials are hearing scattered concerns about internet access from residents who rely on public computers at libraries or community centers. “We have had some people reach out to our office who are concerned with filing for unemployment,” said Christy Clark, executive assistant with the city of Elwood. “They don’t have home computers, the library is closed and stuff. A lot of what we’re doing now is just seeing what we can do to help.”
As the federal government steps in to help businesses of all sizes with a $2.2 trillion stimulus package, some local officials see an opportunity to make meaningful improvements to the area’s broadband grid. “It’s unfortunate that some of these issues have gone unaddressed for a long period of time,” says Clayton Whitson, president and CEO of the Madison County Chamber of Commerce. “But if we’re looking for a silver lining in all this, it’s that we could finally be seeing this come to the forefront of people’s minds as issues to be addressed.”
One small silver lining in the Covid-19 virulent cloud: an unsponsored and truly unbiased empirical test whether wireless broadband networks offer a direct competitive alternative to wired broadband. The answer is clear: No. Not even close. Despite all the happy talk and sponsored researcher advocacy, broadband consumers understand the financial incentive to use Wi-Fi access to wired broadband wherever available. When homebound consumers have access to wireless broadband access via their smartphones and wired broadband access via personal computers and Wi-Fi, they opt for the latter. It makes sense both in terms of the user experience and the pocketbook. Since 2017, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai brazenly has asserted that wireless broadband networks constitute a direct competitive alternative to wired options. This assertion supports his longstanding goal of deregulating early and often on grounds that the marketplace forces discipline and self-regulation without the need for government involvement.
In the United States prior to coronavirus, total home internet traffic averaged about 15% on weekdays. But it started growing in mid March, and by late March it had reached about 35%, clearly connected to all the working and learning from home due to stay-at-home orders. This doubling of work-from-home traffic mirrors the events in China. But it’s too soon to tell if home traffic in the United States will increase permanently even after the crisis has passed. “The data suggests remote working will remain elevated in the U.S. for a prolonged period of time,” wrote analysts at Cowen. They point out that this is likely, considering that the United States has a higher mix of service employees compared to China, which has higher numbers of manufacturing employees who must work on location. It may have been a scramble for some employers to get everything set up for people to transition from the office to home. There were quite a few reports of office VPNs initially not being able to handle the new loads. But now that the shift has happened, there’s a good chance that the quarantine experience in the United States will create a permanent work-from-home culture.
As digital equity work becomes a new priority for decision-makers in both the public and private sectors, several state governments have already put quite a bit of work into bridging the digital divide, primarily by working to foster better broadband access. What Pew Charitable Trust researchers have found is that there’s no magic bullet — no incentive, regulation, law or partnership — that by itself can fix the digital divide. There are, of course, actions that can be taken at all levels of government to support the work. A vital lesson made clear by the Pew Charitable Trust's 10 case studies is that the most effective approach is more like magic buckshot than a magic bullet, meaning that it takes several different actions working in service of the same goal. With that in mind, there are two states that rank as perhaps the best example of what government can accomplish: Maine and North Carolina.
There are millions of small, digitally enabled ventures across America. New research, based on data from 20 million websites, found that these small-scale entrepreneurs generate significant spillover benefits to their communities. The analysis also concluded that counties with more of these ventures experienced stronger recoveries from the last recession than elsewhere, suggesting that “these small web businesses can be an important buffer for individuals and local communities facing economic challenges,” said Marcela Escobari, an economic development expert and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was not involved in the new study. The new analysis, conducted by researchers at Arizona State University and the University of Iowa, is based on a data set assembled and provided by GoDaddy, a large retailer of internet domain names and a website-hosting service.
Telehealth can play a vital role in keeping more Americans healthy and easing the stress on the capacity-strained health care system. Recognizing the role telehealth can play in reducing patients’ potential exposure and helping reduce capacity burdens on health care facilities, Congress cleared barriers to greater usage of telehealth solutions in the early stages of its response to the crisis. The easement of these regulatory barriers will help many seniors with conditions that require monitoring but who would be better off avoiding frequent in-person visits to a health care facility, pursue telehealth alternatives. Yet for many of the Americans who may most benefit from telehealth solutions, including seniors, veterans and those with pre-existing conditions, the current situation has put the spotlight on the impact of the digital divide that leaves more than 17 million Americans in rural areas without access to broadband internet. Congress can help broadband connectivity and the telehealth solutions it supports to ease the strain on rural health care systems, by ensuring stimulus resources can be directed toward broadband buildouts in unserved and underserved communities on a quick time scale. With continued dedication and the right leadership on these issues, we can make tremendous progress in bridging the digital divide — a pre-existing necessity underscored in its urgency by the coronavirus crisis.
[Richard Cullen is the executive director of Connect Americans Now, a Microsoft supported TV white spaces advocate]
When we think of the homework gap, we tend to think of grade school to high school and omit the 19.9 million postsecondary students across the country. Like their younger peers, these students have had their education moved online over the past three weeks to abide by social distancing requirements. More than that, they have been displaced from their residences in college dorms and apartments across the country. Sometimes, that means leaving a campus with a reliable and robust internet network and heading to their parents’ home, perhaps to a rural or remote area, or a low-income area that lacks a broadband connection capable of downloading a document, let alone, the requirements of a live, two-way Zoom conversation. Remember, while 79% of American households have a broadband subscription (and those without cite cost as a major determinant) upwards of 42 million Americans lack access entirely. These are the students on which COVID-19 casts a tremendous digital shadow.
Federal Communications Chairman Ajit Pai identified telemedicine as the industry he is most excited about as a result of the upcoming availability of 1200 megahertz of unlicensed spectrum. Telehealth “can be a gamechanger,” and he can see the opening of 1200 MHz of unlicensed spectrum giving rise to a future of “Wi-Fi-enabled telehealth,” said Chairman Pai. In addition to telehealth, Pai also mentioned augmented reality gaming, virtual reality and warehouse optimization as important beneficiaries of opening spectrum.
Coronavirus-related economic disruption and uncertainty could yet slow the pace of 5G deployment in the U.S. — but for now, the major carriers say they're moving full speed ahead. The major wireless carriers say the coronavirus has not altered the pace of their 5G rollouts, but industry observers and federal officials question how long that will remain true. "As a logical matter, I would expect a slowdown," said former Federal Communications Commission official Blair Levin, now a policy adviser for New Street Research. Levin cited concerns about construction crew members working close to each other; disruptions to supply chains; and consumers' ability and willingness to pay for pricey 5G plans and new phones amid staggering unemployment rates. Companies may say they're moving ahead, Levin said, "but we’re really early into it, and the notion that consumers are going to pay a premium in an economic downturn is counterintuitive to me." There may also be fewer 5G-ready devices as a result of the pandemic.
A New York Times analysis of internet usage in the US from SimilarWeb and Apptopia, two online data providers, reveals that our behaviors shifted, sometimes starkly, as the virus spread and pushed us to our devices for work, play and connecting.
- We are looking to connect and entertain ourselves, but are turning away from our phones. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown.
- With the rise of social distancing, we are seeking out new ways to connect, mostly through video chat
- We have suddenly become reliant on services that allow us to work and learn from home
- The search for updates on the virus has pushed up readership for local and established newspapers, but not partisan sites
- Video games have been gaining while sports have lost out
House lawmakers will now have to email-in bills, amendments and other floor materials — a push to protect members of Congress and their staffers and adhere to public health guidelines during the pandemic. “Staff must electronically submit all Floor documents — including bills, resolutions, co-sponsors and extensions of remarks — to a dedicated and secure email system, rather than deliver these materials by hand to staff in the Speaker’s Lobby or Cloakrooms,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced. “At this time, Members may still drop off materials in person.” These digital procedures will remain in place through at least April 19.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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