By seeking comment, as we do here, on where service is and is not, we should be developing a record that supports an honest assessment of the availability of broadband across the country. But the ugly truth is that when the agency released its last Broadband Deployment Report earlier in 2020 it concluded that broadband deployment was “reasonable and timely” nationwide. In other words, it found all was well.

That’s just not right. For starters, the Federal Communications Commission concluded that there were only 18 million people in the US without access to broadband. That number wildly understates the extent of the digital divide in the country. Earlier in 2020 President Donald Trump signed the Broadband DATA Act directing the FCC to clean up its act and develop data and maps that reflect the true state of broadband access in the US. But the agency has yet to roll up its sleeves to collect any improved information as part of this effort—so the same data problems that existed last time are bound to show upin this inquiry, too.

Plus, in its last report the FCC continued to use a broadband standard that is too low for a nation that has moved so much online.  With many of our nation’s providers offering gigabit service, it’s time for the FCC to adjust its baseline upward, too. We need to reset it to at least 100 megabits per second. While we’re at it we need to revisit our thinking about upload speeds. At present, our standard is 3 megabits per second. But this asymmetrical approach is dated. We need to recognize that with enormous changes in data processing and cloud storage, upload speeds should be rethought. There is, unfortunately, little evidence the FCC is willing to do so in this inquiry.

Finally, in its last report the FCC neglected to meaningfully discuss big issues that contribute to the digital divide. It didn’t consider affordability. It barely mentioned digital literacy. If the agency is serious about living up to its duty to report on the state of broadband in this country, these omissions are a problem. But there is little here to suggest the FCC is seriously considering these matters in this inquiry now. 

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing nearly $3 million to provide broadband service in unserved and underserved rural areas in Missouri. This investment is part of the $100 million in grant funding made available for the ReConnect Pilot Program through the CARES Act. In rural Missouri, Big River Broadband will use a $2.9 million grant to deploy a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to connect 4,839 people, 54 farms, 27 businesses, two public schools and one fire station to high-speed broadband internet in Cape Girardeau County.

A growing number of government programs support broadband deployment. Some programs allow service providers to combine, or “stack,” subsidies in a project’s funding; others have prohibitions against stacking subsidies built into the program rules. Recently this has come up in the debate on the Federal Communications Commission’s new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). This is the question: Should stacking be allowed, or should it be discouraged? Just how does a provider stack subsidies? One example occurs when a CAF II recipient also receives a state subsidy to build a broadband network in the same geographic region. On the one hand, this looks like double-dipping. The provider is paid twice to do the same project. On the other hand, is the first subsidy sufficient to produce the desired results in that area at a satisfactory rate of return? In many cases, it is not. In the interest of making the best use of public funds, it certainly makes sense that we would not want to pay twice for the same construction. On the other hand, things may not get built if service providers can’t get enough help to make the numbers work. If service providers want to build fiber to the most rural areas of this country, they likely will need either bigger upper limits on broadband subsidies, or the ability to obtain funds from multiple services to make the economic model work.

[Trevor Jones is vice president of marketing, sales and customer service for OTELCO, which owns independent telephone companies in seven states and partners with several community networks in Massachusetts]

Ryland Sherman recently wrote an article for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society that recommends that Congress acts to change the rules that allow landlords to block ISPs from their buildings. He also points out that any meaningful change also will require eliminating the ability of ISPs and landlords to negotiate exclusive contracts that block other ISPs from entering buildings. His final recommendation is that any federal laws on the issue should prohibit states from erecting barriers that would keep ISPs out of apartment buildings. These are all great ideas and they’ve been on my wish list for years should there ever be another telecommunications act coming out of Congress. Only Congress can make the needed changes since the Federal Communications Commission has its hands tied by the messy history of court rulings on the subject over the last few decades. Unfortunately, Sherman’s recommended changes alone won’t fix all of the problems. These changes will allow ISPs to enter buildings that they’ve been precluded from. But no law can force ISPs to enter apartment buildings. The reality is that it’s expensive for a new ISP to rewire many apartment buildings. Many ISPs have only agreed to spend the money to wire buildings based upon having an exclusive contract. ISPs won’t enter buildings in a competitive environment when the math doesn’t work. It’s hard to imagine that fixing barriers is going to entice ISPs to serve apartments with low-income tenants. The recommendations made Sherman are needed. Allowing ISPs to enter buildings more freely will spur competition in both speeds and prices. We need to come up with new ideas to get ISPs to serve buildings that are expensive to wire or that serve low-income tenants. This will likely need to be a local solution since every market is different. We can’t rely on the private sector to provide good broadband in all multi-tenant buildings – the incumbents have already been accused in many cities of redlining to avoid low-income neighborhoods. We absolutely should remove all barriers that keep ISPs out of multi-tenant buildings. But we need to go a lot further to find ways to get ISPs to serve all these buildings.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA) sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to give tribes more time to apply for broadband licenses in the 2.5 GHz Band. “We are concerned that the FCC’s failure to provide adequate time for tribes to take full advantage of the 2.5 GHz Rural Tribal Priority Window means fewer tribes will be connected to lifesaving internet service,” Charimen Pallone and Doyle wrote. “The coronavirus has underscored that the digital divide is a deadly chasm, but the FCC can help address this issue. Tribes have been hit particularly hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, and high-speed internet service helps governments better succeed when it comes to public health interventions. The Rural Tribal Priority Window is one important remedy to the digital divide for Indian Country, but without more time, it will not succeed.” The two Committee leaders acknowledged that the FCC has provided a 30-day deadline extension, but pointed out that tribal leaders have implored FCC to implement a 180-day extension. The Committee leaders requested a response from FCC Chairman Pai by Aug 28, 2020.

Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is currently experiencing firsthand the consequences of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC's) 2018 preemption of local governments’ authority to regulate 5G infrastructure in their cities. With its initial handful of applications for new small cell transmitters just submitted to the county board by Verizon under the new rules, local officials are grappling with a host of limitations — including fee caps, shorter timing windows, and rights of way exemptions — which outline clearly a problem more and more communities will face in the coming months and years.

A new initiative called Connected Beyond the Classroom will leverage city-owned fiber infrastructure and $27 million in CARES Act funds to connect students across San Antonio’s 50 most-vulnerable neighborhoods in a bid to close the digital divide and ensure teachers, students, and their parents can continue to learn this fall and beyond. While state law limits the communications services that municipalities can provide, the city is able to leverage its existing fiber network used by the municipal electric utility, government and community buildings, and public safety (called COSANet) to expand school networks all the way to students’ homes. The bulk of the network is already in place, connecting community anchor institutions, light poles, and other city-owned, fiber-connected structures. The $27 million the city received from the CARES Act will, in part, go towards closing the necessary gaps and extending COSANet outward into the targeted neighborhoods. Last-mile connections will come, according to city leaders, from private LTE wireless providers with whom the city has set up agreements for service. This approach resulted from the understanding that using LTE towers were the quickest solution to targeting desired areas. Students will then be able to connect to the network (from their own or school-provided devices) as usual to access class content, though households or devices will need the appropriate hardware (like an exterior antenna or LTE adapter) to translate that signal into one their devices can use.