Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Thursday that the allocation of $100 billion to expand broadband networks in the U.S. under the Biden administration will only serve to hurt consumers and stifle innovation.
AJIT PAI: The FCC alone already has in the pipeline almost $40 billion to help close that digital divide and ensure that Americans have access to the internet that serves their needs. That’s before any of this $100 billion plan that the President proposed even comes to the table and so that’s part of the concern that many have is that there are already plans to attack this problem.
Moreover, the plan itself seems to suggest that they want to overbuild private networks with public funds and have governments own or operate or even micromanage how those networks are going to be constructed and operated.
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Pai's right in that there will be some overlap of public option fiber infrastructure in neighborhoods where investor owned providers have deployed fiber to homes, comprising about a third of all U.S. homes. Implicit in the telecom component of the Biden administration's American Jobs Plan is these providers have gone as far as they can over the past three decades modernizing legacy copper telephone lines built for analog voice communications in the 20th century to fiber for the 21st century's digital services.
They've harvested the low hanging fruit and will struggle to build out to the remaining two thirds of American homes in a timely manner given their lack of patient investment capital relative to the need and their debt burdened balance sheets. The experience of the current pandemic has demonstrated modernization to fiber is far behind where it should be at the start of the new century's third decade. The Biden administration's plan effectively says, "Time's up. We have to turn a new page. History demands it."
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