FCC Broadband Report Negative on State of U.S. Deployment
Two months after an FCC majority refused to find that the U.S. wireless market is competitive in its annual wireless competition report, the same majority is expected to decline to declare that broadband is being deployed to all Americans “in a reasonable and timely fashion,” commission officials said Friday. The latest negative review of how markets are working is in the Section 706 broadband competition report, which the commissioners voted on last week and is expected to be released in the next few days. Republicans Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker are expected to dissent from the broadband report, as they did to the wireless report. The report is the first since the initial report in 1999 not to give the industry a clean bill of health on deployment.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The report said 14 million to 24 million Americans lack access to broadband. The report also said about 80 million don’t subscribe to broadband at home. Instead of looking at individuals, previous reports had looked at households, producing smaller numbers. The new report said 7 million households can’t get broadband.
The goal should be “universal broadband availability,” and the U.S. has fallen short of that, the report concludes. It adds that market forces alone probably can’t ensure the unserved minority will get broadband any time soon.
The finding could have major implications and could lead to further regulation. Section 706 (b) of the Communications Act says if the FCC finds through its 706 inquiry that “advanced telecommunications capability” is not “being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion,” the commission “shall take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.” The report doesn’t say what additional regulation is needed.
McDowell and Baker are concerned that the report focuses too much attention on the 5 percent of Americans unserved, rather than the 95 percent that have access to broadband, officials said. “As with the wireless competition report, the 706 report ignores years of obvious evidence that 95 percent of Americans have access to at least one broadband provider,” an FCC official said. “By overlooking this data one can only conclude that these dramatic reversals are being used as pretexts for a highly regulatory agenda."
Genachowski doesn’t intend the report as an indictment of carriers, another FCC official said, noting the report builds on the National Broadband Plan’s findings. “The private sector can’t be expected to deploy broadband in these expensive areas,” the official said. But these unserved Americans won’t be reached “absent policy reforms.” The 706 report also is the first that uses a realistic number for what constitutes broadband -- 4 Mbps actual speeds for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads, the official said.
Previous 706 report have been contentious. In March 2008, Commissioner Michael Copps and then-Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, both Democrats, dissented from the entire report, because of a finding that broadband deployment nationwide was coming in a “reasonable and timely fashion.” McDowell, a Republican, dissented from part of an accompanying data collection order over concerns about “misleading terminology and definitions” on broadband speeds.
AT&T took up the new report in meetings with McDowell and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn in early June, according to FCC records. “We pointed out that each of the five Section 706 Reports issued since the adoption of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has found that advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion and that the Commission’s own data demonstrates that deployment continues to be reasonable and timely today,” AT&T said in a June 4 ex parte filing.