Chairman Pai Remarks at COVID-19 and the Law Conference

I thought that I’d spend my time this morning talking about how the Federal Communications Commission has responded to COVID-19 and some of the lessons we’ve learned.  The FCC doesn’t just want to encourage private industry to better serve the public, we want to free them to expand and enhance their networks. That’s why we’ve moved aggressively to cut through red tape that often prevents or delays innovative solutions to consumers’ problems. 

One reason our networks have been able to handle the traffic increase is that we’ve seen significant investments and improvements in our broadband infrastructure in recent years. In 2018 and then again in 2019, the United States set records for annual fiber deployment. The number of wireless small cell installations has skyrocketed. And we’ve seen network investment hit levels that our nation hadn’t seen for over a decade.