No More Underbuilding

Jonathan Chambers wrote another great article where he addresses the issue of federal grants having waste, fraud, and abuse. He goes on to say that real waste, fraud, and abuse came in the past when the Federal Communication Commission awarded federal grants and subsidies to the large telephone companies to build networks that were obsolete by the time they were constructed. He uses the term "underbuilding" to describe funding networks that are not forward-looking and is in direct contrast to the large companies that constantly use the term overbuilding to mean they don’t want any grant funding to be used to build any place where they have existing customers. The FCC has been guilty of funding underbuilding over and over again. But the blame doesn’t just lie with the FCC – it lies with all of the broadband advocates in the country. When the broadband providers started to talk non-stop about not allowing overbuilding, we should have been lobbying pro-broadband politicians to say that the FCC should never fund underbuilding. Every broadband network that is constructed is overbuilding somebody, except in those exceptionally rare cases where folks have zero broadband options. If we accept the argument that overbuilding is a bad policy, then it’s easy to justify giving the money to incumbents to do better – something that has failed over and over again.