Monday, August 9, 2021
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FCC Launches New Mobile Broadband Map
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The Senate is right: Broadband is infrastructure. Now it’s time to make history
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As the Senate chips away at final passage of the $550 billion infrastructure package, the compromise’s top detractors are fretting about where negotiators placed the agreed-upon $42.5 billion in broadband deployment grants for states. In comments on the floor, Senate GOP Whip John Thune (R-SD) said he’d prefer that the Federal Communications Commission decide how to distribute those billions — not the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, as negotiators chose. The NTIA “simply has not demonstrated its ability to administer a grant program of this size and complexity,” Sen Thune argued, pointing to the FCC’s far larger workforce and warning that Commerce could repeat some of the mistakes it made when doling out economic stimulus funding in 2009. He also expressed alarm over reports that NTIA recently sought volunteers to review applications for pandemic relief. Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee is trying to persuade colleagues to let the Department of Agriculture (USDA) take the lead. The FCC, BTW, has run into its own stumbles — an agency release described its efforts to “clean up” problems regarding a landmark 2020 rural broadband auction. Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the commission “is ready to carry out whatever responsibilities are delegated to it by Congress to meet the goal of getting 100 percent of us connected and online.”
Telecommunications giants are among the winners of the infrastructure bill, according to Protocol. The package includes $65 billion to expand broadband connectivity and does away with some parts of President Biden's initial proposal that were the least popular with the telecommunications industry, including more aggressive requirements regarding network speed and provisions that would have targeted grant funding to municipal networks. Blair Levin, former executive director of the National Broadband Plan and current policy adviser to New Street Research, said this is good news for all the telecommunications giants but especially Comcast, as "they invested 10 years ago in trying to accomplish the same goal, which is trying to get the currently unconnected people online" through their low-cost Internet Essentials program.
Municipal networks, on the other hand, are on the losing side of the deal after being dropped from the bill. "To me, it looks like the goals of changing the market have been deferred in the effort of developing a bipartisan compromise," said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "The focus is putting money into areas that have nothing, as opposed to trying to be more aggressive and fix the market for everyone." Still, the bill also doesn't write municipal networks out completely. It says states cannot exclude co-ops, nonprofits, local governments and others when it's considering which providers to give funding to. That, Levin pointed out, goes against laws in states across the country that outright forbid municipal networks.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which moved forward in the Senate over the weekend, puts it well: “Access to affordable, reliable, high-speech broadband is essential to full participation in modern life in the United States.” This finding seems so obvious now that it is easy to forget the controversy it provoked pre-pandemic. Senators are right to take this opportunity to bridge a divide that will become only more dangerous as society becomes more digital. The infrastructure debate hinged in its early stages on a not-so-simple question: What is infrastructure, anyway? Legislators are right to agree that broadband counts. After all, Americans don’t get to work on roads, rails and bridges when work is remote. The ability of negotiators to settle on a number as big as the $65 billion in today’s draft legislation is itself impressive. Even more encouraging is the manner in which that $65 billion will be allocated: not only toward creating the connections to make broadband theoretically available to those currently unserved, but also toward making it affordable. These have always been the twin pillars of broadband policy, yet it wasn’t clear until now that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were willing to embrace both.
The Federal Communications Commission published its brand-new map showing mobile coverage and availability data in the US from the country’s largest wireless providers. This is the first public map showing updated mobile coverage released by the FCC and represents a significant improvement over other data previously published by the agency. It also serves as a public test of the standardized criteria developed to facilitate improved mapping under the Broadband DATA Act. Never before have maps been created using these new, standardized mobile data specifications, which will improve the uniformity and consistency of broadband availability data collected by the FCC. This map will allow consumers to search by specific address to better understand whether they should be able to make and receive voice calls or use wireless data, and shows voluntarily submitted 4G LTE broadband data and voice mobile coverage as of May 15, 2021 for each of the nation’s four largest mobile carriers. “A good map is one that changes over time. Today’s new map represents progress in our efforts to implement the Broadband DATA Act and build next-generation broadband maps that can help to connect 100 percent of Americans,” said Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. “Using improved systems and data, we can provide better information about where broadband service is and is not across the country."
This paper describes the challenge of four rural broadband providers operating fiber to the home networks to recover the middle mile network costs of streaming video entertainment and quantifies the amount of the current and future shortfall. It describes the components of the rural broadband networks, policy background for their evolution, an overview of providers, and the financial calculations of cost recovery. The preliminary results show that current broadband prices are approximately $50 per month per subscriber. Separately, subscribers pay about $25 per month in subscriptions to video streaming services Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Microsoft. These five video entertainment streaming providers comprise 75 percent of total network traffic on the four rural broadband networks and require an additional cost of $11.65 per month in capital costs, which is presently absorbed by the broadband providers. The analysis shows that 77–94 percent of total network costs are related to streaming video entertainment. This amounted to $100-180 of unrecovered costs per subscriber annually, whether the subscribing household is streaming a lot of content or not. If we compute the average monthly shortfall for the estimated two-thirds of households that receive significant streaming content, the shortfall is $17.48 per subscriber. Given the popularity and growth of video streaming entertainment, the middle mile cost is expected to double in 3-4 years, while the number of subscribers is expected to stay constant. The unrecovered cost will grow to $25.04 per subscriber or $81,953,409 in total for the four providers.
It feels as if all eyes are on fiber at the moment, with money pouring in and deployment commitments piling up. Operators playing in this space have largely dismissed cable as obsolete, saying cable won’t be able to keep up with multi-gigabit speeds on fiber. But CableLabs contended DOCSIS isn’t dead – and won’t be for a while. CableLabs is the entity responsible for putting out DOCSIS specifications, but it also provides several different specifications for point-to-point coherent optics. Curtis Knittle, Vice President of wired technologies at CableLabs, said all the talk about DOCSIS not being able to keep up with fiber is nonsense. He pointed to the performance offered by DOCSIS 4.0, the most recently released specification, as proof. The DOCSIS 4.0 specification was finalized in March 2020 and will enable downlink speeds of up to 10 Gbps and uplink speeds of up to 6 Gbps once deployed. Knittle said the industry is still working to hammer out a few more items before it hits prime time, including out-of-band requirements, leakage detection and neighbor interference. CableLabs is also planning a series of interoperability test events to allow vendors to check their DOCSIS 4.0 kit, with a few set for late 2021 and more coming in early 2022.
The Senate’s proposed infrastructure bill includes billions of dollars for broadband, but financial investment alone won’t be sufficient to keep America on top. It’s critical that legislators go one step further, leveraging public-private partnerships that benefit society at large. Some core design principles for thinking about public digital infrastructure and data rights are emerging from India. Their goal is to keep the objective and function of platforms simple and data private. India leverages the authentication platform Aadhar, designed to confirm identity in real-time. Payments is similarly viewed as a generic digital utility, as is the ability for users to consent to how their data are used through platforms that act as “data fiduciaries.” For US lawmakers, this type of public-private partnership is not new — it just requires recasting the physical railroad into a digital one. If the state leaves internet and data governance unregulated, it’s likely to be worse both for it and society, leaving just one winner, Big Tech.
[Vasant Dhar is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and director of Graduate Studies for the PhD program at the Center for Data Science at New York University.]
TDS Telecom’s leadership said that the company believes that there is a “sense of urgency” around its fiber strategy and it plans to increase its fiber build within its existing wireline footprint and also in expansion markets outside its footprint. In fact, the company feels such a sense of urgency that it is not naming the markets or the number of markets and addresses where it plans to expand its fiber footprint because of the growing competition in the 1-Gig space. TDS currently offers 1-Gig speeds to 56 percent of its market using both fiber-to-the-home and cable. Vicki Villacrez, senior vice president and CFO of TDS Telecom, said that the company will identify its next expansion markets once it signs construction agreements. The company now has fiber to 37 percent of its wireline footprint, or 338,000 residential addresses, and has a long-term goal of reaching 657,000 addresses in its wireline footprint and its expansion markets.
Howard Trienens, a lawyer who guided the breakup of telecommunications colossus AT&T during the 1980s, excelled at distilling complex problems into solutions his clients could support. AT&T was under pressure from the federal government, its customers, and competitors to loosen its decades-long grip over US telephone service when the company’s chief executive, Charles Brown, asked Trienens to become the company’s general counsel in 1980. Brown had worked with Trienens and his Chicago-based law firm Sidley Austin LLP a decade earlier when Brown ran AT&T’s Illinois Bell Telephone Co. subsidiary. Sidley specialized in representing businesses in regulated industries, such as railroading and electric utilities. Satisfying the government’s demands to end AT&T’s permitted monopoly over service was particularly difficult. The company had argued for years that dismantling the network would jeopardize the quality of local phone service that AT&T supported with profits from its long-distance phone business. But battling the government’s antitrust case against AT&T would likely take years of federal court litigation with an uncertain outcome. Trienens, who died July 26 at 97 years old, eventually advocated for the voluntary separation of AT&T’s regional telephone companies. Divesting these highly regulated providers of local phone service, known collectively as the Baby Bells, would leave AT&T with its long-distance calling service, its equipment-manufacturing business and the freedom to pursue new businesses in computers and cable television. By 1984, AT&T had reached a consent decree with the federal government that created seven new regional phone companies hived out of the Baby Bells. The deal set the stage for the creation of the current telecommunications industry.
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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