America’s hodge podge of unevenly deployed residential fiber optic connections that reach only about one third of all homes can be traced back to public policy expressed in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Although fiber optic technology was available when the law was enacted, the drafters of the statute instead charted a future course based on legacy twisted pair copper telephone lines for dialup and its irregularly deployed successor, DSL. That in turn created path dependency on twisted pair copper to deliver Internet-based services to homes even though it’s technically substantially inferior to fiber given it was designed to deliver analog voice and not digital services.
The fundamental problem with the Act is it viewed telecommunications as a market much like the hot 1990s personal computer market. Its basis is “light touch” market regulation, hoping to encourage market competition that would spur innovation, lifting all boats and creating relative parity in service availability and quality across the nation. PCs are a commodity market whereas telecommunications is not. It’s infrastructure and requires infrastructure policy.
The Biden administration’s infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan, is an opportunity to make a much overdue course correction and establish policy that treats telecommunications as the essential infrastructure it is.
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