Delivering on the Broadband Promise to All Americans

Congress continues to have significant concerns around how to design an infrastructure program to ensure that any dollars designated for broadband are spent wisely. Fortunately, there is a solution. We support an approach that places responsibility on the Federal Communications Commission to disperse any new broadband dollars through its Connect America Fund (CAF) and Mobility Fund (MF) programs. These two programs, as further refined in two orders adopted by the FCC in Feb 2017, provide clear evidence that the FCC has the expertise and the tools to manage a data-driven process that will ensure that any incremental broadband funding is directed where broadband does not currently exist and is needed the most.

To be clear, current CAF II and MF II dollars are unlikely to be sufficient to complete the job of getting broadband deployment to all these remote areas. By our estimate, the $198M/year that will be made available through the CAF II auction is only 21% of the FCC’s own calculated deployment costs for all eligible areas. To address this, bids will be scored and ranked, regardless of geography, from lowest to highest with support awarded to winning projects until funding is exhausted. And we fully expect the budget to run out before all eligible areas are funded. But these programs are the best way to use available dollars and, importantly, these programs leverage private investment to the maximum extent possible by awarding funds to the bidder willing to get the job done at the lowest cost. It’s a true public-private partnership.