Providers dread ‘overbuilding’ to close the digital divide

While the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill could provide as much as $65 billion for new broadband infrastructure in the US to close the digital divide, incumbent telecommunication providers are wary of what they call 'overbuilding.' Roger Timmerman, the executive director of Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) Fiber, said service providers and their lobbyists created the term overbuilding to make new competition sound like a bad thing. “You could describe the same thing as a new competitive offering in the area,” Timmerman said. “Nobody complains about competition. Everybody would celebrate that. But the industry has deemed that as an overbuild.” Yet new entrants don’t literally build their infrastructure on top of existing infrastructure; it’s done in parallel. To a certain extent, Timmerman understands where the incumbents are coming from. They’ve made private investments in infrastructure, and they feel it’s unfair for new competitors to be subsidized with taxpayer monies. The problem is that the incumbents are determined to squeeze every last dollar out of their old and outdated technologies—such as DSL and hybrid fiber coax—leaving a lot of people in the US without high-speed broadband.