Reaction to FCC's 2020 Broadband Deployment Report

Benton Senior Fellow Jonathan Sallet:  To say that advanced broadband services are being deployed to all Americans on a “reasonable and timely basis” is to ignore the rapidly changing reality of how Americans work, live, learn, socialize, and receive healthcare — all through home broadband connections. The FCC’s analysis is woefully inadequate:

• It counts broadband as being present where the FCC knows that it is not present, 
• It recognizes soon-to-be-obsolete 25/3 networks as “advanced” when they are not, and
• It fails to consider that Americans in the current crisis have dramatically changed the importance of home broadband connections (including the adequacy of upstream speeds in a moment of videoconferences galore).

Now is the time for the FCC to face up to what the nation now knows: everyone in the United States needs to be able to use High-Performance Broadband.

Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn: The FCC’s conclusion that broadband is being deployed to all Americans on a reasonable and timely basis defies reality. Over the past six weeks it has become painfully apparent to the press, policymakers and the general public that tens of millions of Americans don’t have access to high-speed broadband Internet service. Yet Chairman Pai has decided that it’s time to take a victory lap even as millions of children cannot do their schoolwork, workers cannot telecommute and families cannot connect to friends, neighbors or each other during the COVID-19 pandemic. The FCC’s report suffers from many flaws, but two especially warrant mention. The first is that once again the FCC relies upon data from broadband Internet access providers that bipartisan members of Congress and the agency itself admit grossly overstates the number of Americans with access to broadband. Second, the FCC stubbornly refuses to change the definition of broadband from 25 Mbps download speed and 3 Mbps upload speed, a definition the Wheeler FCC set 5 years ago. Anyone who is telecommuting while their spouse does the same and their children engage in distance learning knows that 25/3 broadband is woefully inadequate. While the Chairman frequently boasts about the improvements in broadband speeds during his tenure, he and his Republican colleagues declined to set a new definition that reflects both those speeds and how Americans use broadband today.

Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge: The FCC’s statement that broadband is being deployed to all Americans on a reasonable and timely basis is simply not true. Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, it’s become clear to millions of Americans that they do not have the broadband they need for their families to complete schoolwork, work remotely, access virtual medical care, stream entertainment, or connect with loved ones, particularly all at once. 

Joshua Stager, senior counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute: This report is out of touch with what is happening in America. The ongoing pandemic has laid bare a stark reality: millions of people do not have reliable or affordable access to the internet. This problem actively undermines our efforts to combat COVID-19, including stay-at-home orders that wrongly assume people have home access to online services. Despite all of this, Chairman Pai chose today to conclude that broadband is being deployed ‘in a reasonable and timely fashion.’ This conclusion strains credulity, and we know it is based on faulty data. It also fails to grasp that the pandemic has undeniably raised the bar for what ‘reasonable’ broadband looks like. The FCC needs to recognize this crisis for what it is, stop playing with bad data, and take stronger action to help people get online and stay connected.

“Even under normal circumstances, the conclusion that broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely manner is simply wrong,” said Eric Null, U.S. Policy Manager at Access Now. “Under today’s exceptional circumstances with much of the nation staying home and in desperate need of more and better broadband, today’s conclusion shows the FCC would rather callously stick its head in the sand and pretend everything is fine than tackle actual, documented connectivity problems that have plagued underrepresented communities in this country for decades. Thanks to the FCC, those communities likely will continue to go without high-quality internet at a time when that is unacceptable.”