U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced June 6 that the Trump administration would be revising the program rules for the $43.45 billion Broadband Equity and Deployment (BEAD) program, authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA).
Lutnick said the program requires retooling in order to ensure Americans can obtain the full “benefit of the bargain” Congress intended in enacting the IIJA: broadband deployment. The Biden administration, in keeping with the infrastructure construction and modernization intent of the IIJA, administered BEAD with an infrastructure focus and specifically fiber to the premises (FTTP) and middle mile advanced telecommunications infrastructure.
The current administration however is reverting to the policy framework in place since the 1990s. It defines “broadband” as a service based on specified “high speed” throughput. The infrastructure to deliver it isn’t specified in this “technology neural” policy. In the original version of the IIJA, it was: FTTP. That fell away in a subsequent amendment of the legislation. (See earlier blog post here).
By deemphasizing landline infrastructure and instead making BEAD subsidies available for cheaper and less reliable non-landline infrastructure delivered service as fixed wireless and low earth orbit satellite, the Trump administration will “connect more Americans to broadband more quickly, and at a lower cost to the American taxpayer,” said Lutnick, who also serves as acting administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), charged with implementing BEAD.
However, Americans have never gotten the real benefit of the bargain: universal service of Internet protocol-based advanced telecommunications delivered by landline like voice telephone service before it. The expectation of that bargain was expressed as public policy in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, the Act “expanded the traditional goal of universal service to include increased access to both telecommunications and advanced services …for all consumers at just, reasonable and affordable rates.”
The closest federal policy came to mandating universal access to advanced telecommunications was in 2015 when the FCC placed Internet protocol telecommunications under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, classifying it as a common carrier utility requiring reasonable requests for service be honored and barring neighborhood redlining. The FCC declined to enforce its regulation adopting the reclassification and ultimately reversed course in 2018, repealing it.
The IIJA did not affirmatively express public policy of universal service. It merely stated findings that access is “essential to full participation in modern life in the United States.” Universal service is described in the legislation by its inverse: a “persistent ‘digital divide’ in the United States.” It charged states receiving planning grants to only determine how long it would take to construct infrastructure providing universal service.
That Americans have not seen universal landline delivered advanced telecommunications reflects a longstanding problem of insufficient political will for policy ensuring fiber would reach most every American doorstep. That would constitute “belt and suspenders” advanced telecommunications infrastructure that would serve well into the 21st century.
Instead, Americans have seen numerous, limited one off subsidies largely directed to investor owned providers with limited capacity to invest. Often that has meant no FTTP belt and only wireless suspenders to reliably hold up the trousers of its connectivity needs over the long term.
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