Senate Small Business Committee Hears Concerns, Needs about Broadband Access
Slow broadband speeds and insufficient access stifles small business, business owners and executives told the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee during a round table discussion Thursday. “Broadband Internet service is the ability to open doors for small businesses that have been historically shut,” said Committee Chair Mary Landrieu, D-La. “Broadband can help some small businesses function like big businesses and increase their geographic presence by moving their operations online."
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High-speed broadband “really is vital for us to communicate,” said Angela Benton, CEO of Black Web Media. “We could not operate as a business without it.” When service goes down, “we sit and stare at the wall,” said Chris Chapman, owner of Snow Sports Deals. “A lot of my customers live in rural areas” and have only DSL. “We're showing larger images, richer images” on the web, and many customers can’t access them, he said.
When a prospective employee doesn’t have access, “it’s a tough decision for me from a hiring perspective because they are not going to be able to access our network,” said Ekohs President Deborah Lansdowne. If a worker has trouble with access, “that employee is basically useless to me, because every single thing we have is online. That’s how we communicate, that’s how we do business."
Universal Service Fund reform, greater rural access from incumbent local exchange carriers and digital education resources are needed to help small businesses thrive, they said. The current USF supports basic phone service and “incorporates 50-year-old regulations and policies,” said Worldcall CEO Lowell Feldman. “In essence, every small business that’s out there has to pay into this fund,” and “subsidize not just other companies that they compete against, but a service that you're not even technically allowed to provide. That’s just wrong.” The government also should find a more direct way of subsidizing access to low-income households, he said.
Efforts “should go a little further than subsidies,” Lansdowne said. The government and businesses should create education and job programs for people “so they can see how broadband will affect their day-to-day lives."
Small businesses also are hindered when operating out of areas that can’t receive more sophisticated services, some said. “If you move outside a major city and if you're not in one of the magic zones, you're in the dark,” said Jesse Vaughan, GigaTrust information and technology director. “It seems like bigger businesses [LECs] are only penetrating certain markets and they don’t include rural or unserved communities,” Benton said. If aspiring entrepreneurs don’t have high-speed access, “it just sets them back.” On the other hand, ILECs should be offered incentives, Vaughan said. The government should “provide incentives to large service providers to provide broadband service to areas that don’t have it."
The committee also heard testimony about funding through the Small Business Administration and the broadband stimulus programs. In some cases, “it’s nearly impossible to deal with the Rural Utilities Service,” Feldman said. “If you are not a Title II ILEC, you have all these hits against you.” The committee should “suggest to RUS that instead of trying to manage the fund where it’s only for ILECs, open it up to allow small businesses to come in and leverage the money that has already been allocated by Congress” so that small companies can build infrastructure.