Deloitte white paper points up flawed U.S. policy of chasing throughput versus modernizing copper to fiber

Despite more than $107 billion in federal subsidies between 2010 and 2020 to boost throughput outside of densely populated metro centers, the United States hasn't obtained appreciable and durable benefit, concludes a recently issued white paper by the consulting firm Deloitte.

Optimism over the past 10 years that billions of private and public investment in underserved geographies for broadband access and adoption would help close the digital divide has waned as outcomes have often disappointed. Previous programs increased the number of people with access to the FCC’s definition of broadband by less than 1% (<1%; 1.6 million people) between 2014 and 2019, partially as a result of the changing definition of broadband.

Unless the nation changes course on telecommunications policy and stops chasing "broadband" throughput and instead replaces copper telephone lines reaching nearly every American home with fiber, the paper suggests, it will continue the wasteful cycle and reap less than optimal economic advantage. 

The Biden administration's proposed infrastructure plan offers an opportunity to do that by prioritizing fiber built by public sector and nonprofit corporations that don't carry the burden of generating profits that disincentivizes investing in fiber and only doing so proscribed neighborhood deployments that potentially offer the most favorable return on investment. A big advantage of building public option fiber is it ends the broadband speed chase since fiber can easily accommodate expected growth in bandwidth requirements. That necessitates dispensing with the "technology neutral" standard of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that gave rise to unending debates over what constitutes broadband and the related issue of net neutrality, as described in the Deloitte paper:

Since 1996, the US government has set minimum speed requirements to define broadband service, with the hopes of keeping pace with the exponential growth in consumption. These minimum performance expectations have changed as applications require increasing amounts of bandwidth. From 2011 to 2014, the FCC definition of broadband was 4 Mbps uplink and 1 Mbps downlink. In 2015, the FCC updated its definition of broadband to speeds of 25 Mbps downlink and 3 Mbps uplink. The 2015 broadband definition, which persists today, was more suitable to support new applications. Now, pandemic induced requirements for streaming, videoconferencing, and the promise of further innovation make the FCC’s 2015 broadband definition of 25/3 the topic of ongoing debate at both the state and federal levels.