2018 Broadband Deployment Report

In the wake of the 2015 Title II Order,  the deployment of advanced telecommunications capability slowed dramatically. From 2012 to 2014, the two years preceding the Title II Order, fixed terrestrial broadband Internet access was deployed to 29.9 million people who never had it before, including 1 million people on Tribal lands. In the following two years, new deployments dropped 55 percent, reaching only 13.5 million people, including only 330,000 people on Tribal lands. From 2012 to 2014, mobile LTE broadband was newly deployed to 34.2 million people, including 21.5 million rural Americans. In the following two years, new mobile deployments dropped 83 percent, reaching only 5.8 million more Americans, including only 2.3 million more rural Americans. And from 2012 to 2014, the number of Americans without access to both fixed terrestrial broadband and mobile broadband fell by more than half—from 72.1 million to 34.5 million. But the pace was nearly three times slower after the adoption of the 2015 Title II Order, with only 13.9 million Americans newly getting access to both over the next two years.

That’s why over the past year, the FCC has followed the congressional command and taken repeated “action[s] to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.” Most notably since the last report, the FCC has taken concrete actions to reduce regulatory barriers to the deployment of wireline and wireless infrastructure, constituted a Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee to assist in these efforts, reformed the legacy high-cost universal service program to ensure accountability and introduce opportunities for new entrants through reverse auctions, modernized our rules for business data services to facilitate facilities-based competition, authorized new uses of wireless spectrum both terrestrially and in the sky, and repealed the heavy-handed regulations of the Title II Order by returning to a light-touch approach to broadband Internet access.

With these changes in policy to accelerate deployment, we believe that the Commission is now encouraging the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans.