Treasury Department guidance on American Rescue Plan Act funding for state and local government fiber projects raises questions on throughput standard

The U.S. Treasury Department has updated guidance on the use of $10 billion in American Rescue Plan Act grant funding to state, local and tribal governments for capital projects to construct advanced telecom infrastructure. The text below is excepted from the guidance:

Broadband Infrastructure Projects. The construction and deployment of broadband infrastructure projects (“Broadband Infrastructure Projects”) are eligible for funding under the Capital Projects Fund program if the infrastructure is designed to deliver, upon project completion, service that reliably meets or exceeds symmetrical download and upload speeds of 100 Mbps. If it would be impracticable, because of geography, topography, or excessive cost, for a Broadband Infrastructure Project to be designed to deliver services at such a speed, the Project must be designed so that it reliably meets or exceeds 100 Mbps download speeds and between 20 Mbps and 100 Mbps upload speeds and be scalable to a minimum of 100 Mbps symmetrical for download and upload speeds. Treasury encourages Recipients to focus on projects that will achieve last-mile connections. Recipients considering funding middle-mile projects are encouraged to have commitments in place to support new and/or improved last-mile service.

This guidance favors fiber to the premises projects providing symmetrical throughput, something fiber can easily support. What's curious is the highlighted text. It begs the question of how "geography, topography, or excessive cost" (and what would be excessive?) would allow projects providing asymmetric throughput to qualify if those specific qualifications are met. It makes no sense because none of those factors would reasonably affect whether the delivered throughput is symmetric or asymmetric for a fiber to the premises project. Treasury clearly has some more explaining to do.

Biden administration’s delayed FCC appointments suggests telecom policy strategy overhaul in the works

Telecom policy wonks fretted and info tech press have scratched their heads for months over the Biden administration’s delay in fully staffing the Federal Communications Commission and naming a permanent chair. Affording the administration the benefit of the doubt, it’s likely the new administration has been taking its time developing a wholistic two-pronged telecommunications strategy.

Here’s how it might be playing out. The goal of the first part is to address the nation’s accumulated advanced telecommunications infrastructure deficits built up over the past two decades and bring robust connectivity to as many American doorsteps as quickly as possible. That element of the strategy is expressed in the administration’s “build back better” American Jobs Plan infrastructure initiative, now legislation pending in the House. It appropriates $42 billion to the states for advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

The second strategy prong would have a longer timeline with the goal of establishing a durable regulatory and subsidy regime to ensure Americans can get connectivity no matter where they live, with reliable service at affordable rates. It’s linked to the first prong: The infrastructure measure would require the FCC to conduct an inquiry on universal service and make policy recommendations to Congress.

Given the broad and long-term implications of that component, the administration would naturally want to move at a deliberate pace in nominating FCC members as well as naming a permanent chair. The administration would want to ensure its nominees are fully on board with its broader strategy and able to implement it.

It’s also possible the administration is mulling over the respective roles of the FCC and National Telecommunications and Information Administration relative to advanced telecommunications as part of a broader restructuring that could end up as a legislative proposal later in the administration. The NTIA will develop rules and oversee the telecom infrastructure funding allocated in the pending infrastructure bill.

Americans have a strong public interest group on advanced telecommunications policy: themselves. And they’ve been lobbying hard for two decades.

It has been postulated that America’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure deficits are largely attributable to the lack of public interest representation in public policymaking. There’s no equivalent of the Sierra Club for environmental policy in the case of telecommunications policy as Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Institute for Local Self Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, observed in a recent Background Briefing with Ian Masters (@10:18).

That’s not entirely true. For years, Americans have been barraging their elected representatives at all levels of government with complaints and pleas for action to remedy lack of connectivity, high costs and poor customer service. When people are vexed to see neighbors just down the road or around the bend with landline connections but not available at their address and don’t get a satisfaction from providers, their next calls are often to their elected representatives and the news media. It’s been going on two decades now. It began in the early 2000s when DSL service didn’t quite extend to their homes and calls to telephone companies for connections were rebuffed or service promised “soon” that never arrived as the years crept by. Meanwhile, many were forced to turn to substandard, poor value wireless options.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying public health measures that turned homes into offices, classrooms and medical clinics, their predicament grew more dire and the calls to elected representatives for action more desperate as household members dealt with sluggish, unreliable and costly connectivity. In 2020, some elected representatives noted the subject had become the top issue in constituent communications with their offices.

When people don’t see their situations improving year after year despite their petitions to elected officials and only lip service from them, they naturally begin to wonder if they are really being heard. They grow disillusioned and angry and receptive to corrosive political messaging that the “system is rigged against them.”

A reinforcing perception that has become something of self-fulfilling prophecy is the big telephone and cable companies are the only voices that truly count. People can petition their elected representatives all they want, but their supplications don’t really mean anything in the end because the companies will always get their way and investors’ interests outweigh those of the public. It’s a variation on testimony by the then president of General Motors at a 1953 Senate hearing suggesting that what’s good for GM is good for America.

The comparison doesn’t apply to AT&T and Comcast today. While most Americans could buy an affordable car in the 1950s, many cannot get a landline advanced telecommunications connection at most any price or at an affordable monthly rate for those that can.