Ex-FCC Officials Say Rural-Urban Digital Divide Not Plan’s Intention
National Broadband Plan authors defended the document’s broadband speed recommendations in a laid-back and mostly friendly conversation Friday afternoon with the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association. Reporters and NTCA officials huddled on opposite ends of a large conference table, while in the middle and sitting across from each other, new NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield and former FCC broadband team members Blair Levin and Erik Garr debated what many rural carriers and some members of Congress have called the broadband plan’s double standard: 100 Mbps proposed for 100 million homes, but Universal Service Fund support in rural areas for only 4 Mbps.
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Rural carriers are “caught in a conflict,” said Bloomfield, because financial lenders want the companies to install the “technology that makes the most sense,” usually fiber, said Bloomfield. But government funding for only 4 Mbps would limit what companies can deploy, she said. “You're setting the stage to potentially really do damage on the good side of the rural divide that tried to experiment with doing something on the other side of the rural divide, and it’s just really scary for our members,” said Tom Wacker, NTCA vice president. The U.S. can’t claim it will be No. 1 in the world on broadband “if it’s willing to write off” rural areas, he said.
It’s more important to focus on broadband uses than network speeds, said Levin, now at the Aspen Institute. “I actually don’t think global leadership is defined by network speeds,” he said. High speeds are worthless if people can’t afford it, don’t know how to use it, or have no software to take advantage of it, he said. “We are the global leader not because of metrics but because” the U.S. is home to companies like Google, Facebook, Intel and Cisco, he said. The government has limited funds, and the country as a whole will lose out if the only focus is the 5 percent that don’t have broadband infrastructure, Levin said. “If we don’t have really huge connectivity” to research institutions and big cities, and “really good mobile broadband, that to me is much worse.”
Economics make it easier for urban areas to reach the 100 Mbps goal, but setting the target wasn’t meant to create a digital divide between rural and urban areas, said Garr, a partner at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. Rather, the idea was to encourage investment in the U.S. by companies looking for an established market in which to sell innovative applications that require high speeds, he said.
In setting broadband goals for rural areas, Levin said the FCC team asked three questions: (1) What speed, (2) how much it will cost, and (3) how to pay for it. The broadband team found no compelling reason to recommend subsidization of actual speeds more than 4 Mbps, said Garr. Only entertainment applications benefit from faster speeds, and the broadband team couldn’t justify government spending for that purpose, he said. But 4 Mbps is plenty for things like accessing Social Security resources and interacting with government officials, he said.
"At the end of the day, I don’t think we're that far apart,” said Bloomfield. Both sides want rural areas to experience the benefits of high-speed connections, she said. Having a plan beats having no plan, and there’s still time to work out the details, said Levin. But he cautioned, “If we get paralyzed by any plan having a problem, and we can’t do it … the whole thing collapses.”