Blair Levin

Eleven years ago Congress asked for a National Broadband Plan. Ten years ago, we delivered it. If Congress were to ask for such a plan for the next decade, what would it contain?  What did we learn from doing the 2010 Plan that would be useful for a team doing one in 2021 to know? I will address those questions by discussing four key differences between then and now, delineating three key learnings, and closing with some eternal truths that animated our effort and should animate the next as well as making one quick suggestion relating to broadband in time of the coronavirus.

City Utilities, Springfield's (MO) city-owned electric utility, recently announced plans to expand its fiber optic network to every home in the city and lease excess fiber—on a nonexclusive basis—to the internet service provider (ISP) CenturyLink. CenturyLink, in turn, will offer high-speed fiber broadband services citywide and pay for marketing and customer service costs.

In its quest for solutions and partnerships, the New York City's Internet Master Plan is a sharp contrast to the Federal Communications Commission’s approach, which started with the idea that the primary tool for deploying next generation networks was deregulation, and that cities themselves were the major cause of most delays.

The digital divide is not exclusively or even most significantly a rural problem. Three times as many households in urban areas remain unconnected as in rural areas. And regardless of geography, access isn’t the main reason these homes are without Internet service. The vast majority of US homes without broadband service could have it today, but they don’t want it.

Recently, President Donald Trump and Federal Communications Commission Ajit Pai held a news conference to announce “two new steps” that together would position the United States as a leader in deploying 5G wireless networks. There were three distinct problems with the announcement: the steps were not new, they did not advance critical 5G deployments, and they did nothing to help American leadership in driving and benefiting from the next big transition in wireless communications.

What should be the broadband agenda for infrastructure legislation? Here are some key principles.

Who would Americans trust to best understand the broadband-related interests of the residents of a city: its mayor, or the head of the Federal Communications Commission? About twice as many Americans have a positive view of their local government than they do the federal government. Americans would be right in trusting mayors more than federal officials.

The economic reality of varied broadband deployments is that communities with the fastest speeds are most likely to benefit from competition among providers, which further pushes prices down. Thus, we soon will have a divide in which certain dense and high-income communities will have multiple choices for affordable gigabit services, while less dense, lower-income communities may still be stuck with a DSL offering that is 100 times slower but similarly priced.

We sympathize with the increased anxiety over the poor data hygiene practices of leading tech platforms. And we agree that legislation clarifying the duties of those who collect and use personal information is important, as is delineating enforcement responsibilities among agencies and jurisdictions. We’re concerned, however, by the passionate but incomplete argument that it’s time to jettison decades of antitrust policy that limits the government to intervening only when market concentration has, or could, cause higher prices for consumers.

The Coalition for Local Internet Choice and the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors asked for my view of the Federal Communications Commission’s pending order, proposing to cap the fees that state and local governments may charge for small-cell attachments. According to the FCC’s draft order, these price‐caps will save the industry $2 billion in costs to operate in metropolitan areas—which will translate into $2.5 billion in new wireless investment, primarily in rural areas. Here are my concerns: