The Senate infrastructure bill’s four interconnected broadband components

Congress has done a lot more than just set goals for access to broadband services—it finally provided the funding to do so. Most recently, the Senate passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which, if passed by the House, would provide another $65 billion in funding. But to understand what the Senate both did and did not do in the new infrastructure package, we cannot simply focus on spending levels. It is essential to understand how the legislations's four primary pieces of broadband policy fit together to move the country toward its long-held goals of universal access and adoption. First, the Senate funded the capital expenditures likely to be sufficient to deploy a future-proof network to nearly every business and home in the United States. Second, the Senate provided a subsidy for low-income Americans to connect to broadband, sufficient to both build an appropriate system and to give the FCC time to restructure the current inadequate and fragile universal service program. Third, the Senate ordered the FCC to come up with a plan to reform universal service. Fourth, the Senate provided a surge of funding to address digital training and literacy.