California Bill Would Make New Broadband Networks More Expensive

The state of California is primed to bring 21st-century fiber access at affordable rates to every Californian. All of the recent state and federal efforts will help bring every Californian affordable fiber internet access. But a bill in the California legislature threatens to undo all of that good work. A.B. 2749, authored by Assemblymember Quirk-Silva, would prohibit the California Public Utilities Commission from requiring providers to offer affordable service to all Californians, and force them to wrongly treat fixed wireless offerings as equivalent to fiber infrastructure. It would also place a completely arbitrary 180-day review shot-clock on the review of applications to federal funding, which will short-circuit public provider efforts to deliver fiber. All these provisions run contrary to both the established goals of the Biden Administration and the Newsom administration to deliver affordable, future-proof fiber to all. A.B. 2749 has passed the Assembly and is now headed to the Senate. If this bill—which is supported by industry providers like AT&T and Frontier Communications—were to pass, areas that currently do not even have basic service, primarily rural and urban poor areas, would suffer most of all.

[Chao Liu is a legislative associate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.]