Analysis

What to expect from a GOP House majority on broadband, 5G, and big tech

With a White House and Senate under Democratic control, passing sweeping legislation may be a challenge for House Republicans, but it’s likely that they will apply pressure on the current and forthcoming tech policy goals of the Biden-Harris administration. Despite Republicans’ concerns with the current administration’s spending, closing the digital divide should be an area of opportunity for bipartisan action, especially since many Republicans have constituents in severely underserved rural areas.

Competing Against Big Cable Companies

How can a small internet service provider (ISP) compete against the big cable companies? Comcast and Charter together have roughly 55% of all broadband customers in the country, so they are formidable competitors. But the two big cable companies have one obvious weakness – their prices are significantly higher than everybody else in their markets. Every marketing push by these companies involves giving temporary low special prices to lure customers – but those prices eventually revert to much higher list prices. Fixed wireless access (FWA) is clearly competing in price.

Update: Comparing the New FCC Fabric to the Census

The Federal Communications Commission released a file that contains the number of “units” (usually housing units) in the  Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric (Fabric). There are 158 million “units” in the Fabric and 140 million housing units in the 2020 Census. In the least dense 2,143 counties, there are 30 million “units” in the Fabric and 24.5 million Census housing units. As counties get more rural, the Fabric increasingly has more locations than the Census. In the least dense counties, the Fabric routinely has 40% more locations than the Census.

Closing the digital divide in Black America

The digital divide was first recognized in the mid-1990s. Three decades later, due in part to long-standing economic inequity and the economics of broadband, it remains an impediment to inclusive economic growth, particularly in Black American communities. There are five steps that state and local leaders and broadband stakeholders could take to expand broadband access and promote digital equity and inclusion in Black communities:

Assessing Broadband Affordability Initiatives

Reducing the broadband affordability gap is an important and noble goal. Unfortunately, it is far from clear whether Lifeline, the federal program tasked with getting low-income households online, actually addresses this problem. For over a decade, academics, government watchdogs, and independent auditors have criticized the Federal Communications Commission’s inability or unwillingness to measure the program’s effectiveness—while private studies suggest much of this spending may be misdirected toward families at no risk of losing internet access.

The FCC Communications Marketplace Report: More Must Be Done to Enable Broadband Competition and Choice

Big kudos to the Federal Communications Commission for the release of its Communications Marketplace Report at the end of 2022. This is the first Communications Marketplace Report released under FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel’s leadership, so none of us should be surprised that there are vast improvements in the information covered.

Broadband Access & Home Networking Market—A Look into 2023

Over the last two years, you’d be hard-pressed to find an area of service provider networks that have received more investment and attention than broadband access networks. For mature markets, it is rare to see consecutive years of double-digit revenue growth.

Should You Be Benchmarking?

As recently as fifteen years ago, I was often asked by many of my clients to help them benchmark their internet service provider (ISP) against their peers. By this, they wanted to know if they had the right number of employees for their customer base, if their revenues and expenses were in line with other similar ISPs, if they had too much expense from overheads, etc. It turns out that ISPs were not particularly comparable. They seemed to differ in most of the statistics that my clients wanted to understand.

Public Knowledge Asks Supreme Court To Protect Free Expression, Competition Online in Gonzalez v. Google

Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit interactive computer services to exercise editorial discretion when publishing third-party content, without facing liability. This case seeks to hold YouTube liable for publishing objectionable third-party content. Section 230 does not allow this. Petitioners try to work around this clear statutory prohibition by characterizing their theory of liability in different terms.

Is US Broadband Service Slow?

Opponents of the current private-sector-provided broadband system have long engaged in a campaign to convince people that US broadband is deficient. Critics malign the quality of US broadband networks by claiming the speeds are too slow. But the question of speed is deceptively complex since there is general confusion over what constitutes “fast” broadband.

The End of ACP

There are almost 15.6 million households using the broadband subsidy from the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). The program started with a little over 9 million households at the start of 2022 and added over 500,000 new enrollees per month. Several folks who track funding say that ACP is going to run out of money sometime in the summer of 2024. The obvious solution to keep ACP operating is for Congress to refill the ACP funding bucket.

Broadband Offices’ Perspectives on FCC Broadband Map Deadline

State governments were asked to submit challenges to the accuracy of the Federal Communications Commission's new National Broadband Map ahead of a Jan. 13, 2023 deadline. So, how have states navigated this process, and what are they working on next until these funds are allocated? 

Hearings on Broadband Grants

The House of Representatives' recently announced broadband hearings want to look at two issues. The first is to make sure that the grants are only used for connecting to unserved locations and not used for ‘overbuilding’. This has been a major talking point for the big cable companies for years – they don’t want to see any grant money used to encroach on areas they think of as their service territories.

American Rescue Plan Helping North Carolina Complete Access to Broadband

North Carolina’s rural population is larger than that of any other state except Texas. More than 4 million people live in rural North Carolina. Over the last 10 years, the population of 18- to 64-year-olds living in these areas has been decreasing, and the population of adults 65 and older is steadily increasing. In addition to these demographic changes, rural North Carolina communities face challenges related to workforce development, capital access, infrastructure, health, land use, and environment and community preservation.

Do the state challenges to the FCC maps really matter for BEAD?

As the January 13 deadline looms for states to challenge the current Federal Communications Commission broadband coverage map, many states are asking for more time. I'm starting to wonder, however, whether more time is actually all that important. The FCC process is NOT building a location-level map of actual delivered broadband speeds, but rather a map of the performance that providers say they can deliver if a customer requests it. So let's try to put all of this together and see what it means. For me, a few key takeaways stand out (All of this is not to say that state efforts to understa

Measuring Sustainability

I’ve seen folks around the country suggesting that state broadband offices ought to put a priority on sustainability when selecting winners of broadband grant funding. It’s a concept that has instant appeal, but I immediately asked myself what it means. How do you measure sustainability in a way that can be used to score grant requests? The first test of sustainability is the expected life of the assets being constructed. Another test of any internet service provider (ISP) on sustainability is the financial ability and willingness to replace those electronics.

Will the FCC Maps Get Better?

It is unfortunate timing that the new Federal Communications Commission broadband map was issued in the middle of the process of trying to determine the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant funding. Congress said that the amount of funding that will go to each state must be based upon the FCC map – and the first draft is clearly flawed. However, assuming that that grant funding question gets resolved somehow, there remains the bigger issue of whether the new FCC map will ever accurately portray broadband availability.

American Rescue Plan Act Will Help Connect Illinois

As part of his $45 billion Rebuild Illinois investment strategy, Governor JB Pritzker (D-IL) launched a statewide initiative, Connect Illinois, in August 2019 to expand broadband access across the entire state.

Challenging Cellular Data Speeds

There has been a lot of recent press about the new ability for households to challenge broadband coverage claimed at their homes by internet service providers (ISP). The Federal Communications Commission's new National Broadband Map also allows folks to challenge the coverage claimed by cellular carriers. There are two ways to challenge the claimed cellular coverage – by individuals or by local governments. The challenge process for individuals is as follows:

What States Need to Know About Federal BEAD Funding for High-Speed Internet Expansion

In November 2021, President Joe Biden (D) signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) into law.

Indiana is All IN on Broadband

Back in August 2022, the U.S. Treasury approved Indiana's plans to use $187 million of Capital Projects Fund support for its Next Level Connections program. That was 92 percent of the state's total Capital Projects Fund and earmarked to provide funds for the deployment of broadband infrastructure to provide eligible broadband service to unserved end users, which include households, businesses and community anchor institutions, such as schools and health clinics, across Indiana.

FCC: Broadband Market is on the Cusp of Generational Change

On Friday, December 30, 2022, the Federal Communications Commission released its third Communications Marketplace Report. In the RAY BAUM’S Act of 2018, Congress requires the FCC to assess the state of competition in the communications marketplace.

An FCC on Hold

For the first time in my memory, the Senate does not have the votes to approve the nominated FCC Commissioner, Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society]. This has meant that the FCC has been on hold and we’ve had a two-year deadlock between the two Democratic and Republican Commissioners on any controversial issues. There are a number of FCC initiatives that are on hold until there is a fifth Commissioner:

Why the Complexity?

While there has been a lot of activity on the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program, there is still a long way to go before this grant money is used to build new broadband infrastructure. Most of the delay is due to the incredible complexity of the BEAD grant rules. The priority for state grant programs is usually to quickly get the money out the door and spent on infrastructure. Why are the BEAD grants so complicated?