Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Could Face Pushback at Thursday's Meeting
An NPRM on the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), proposed by Chairman Ajit Pai for a vote Thursday, could face some questions by FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks. They're concerned because it’s a large program and the FCC has struggled to develop the right data for making more accurate assessments of which areas are unserved or underserved, industry and agency officials said Tuesday. The program would distribute up to $20.4 billion over 10 years.
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The proposed program would use a two-phase process, an FCC official told us: The first phase focuses on census blocks that are completely unserved, while phase 2 reaches into partially served blocks. By that time the second phase launches, the FCC will have the granular data through the broadband mapping item (see 1907260039), also on Thursday’s agenda, the official said.
Other wireless groups have been quiet, but the Wireless ISP Association is emerging as a proponent of FCC action. “This item should be applauded,” said WISPA Pres. Claude Aiken during a teleconference Tuesday staged by the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute at New York Law School.
A $20 billion program “is a huge investment in rural America,” Aiken said. “The path that the FCC appears to be going down would open” the program “to all comers, including nontraditional providers like WISPs,” he said. “Potentially,” RDOF “could use some small tweaks, but for the most part we’re very happy,” Aiken said.
Other wireless associations declined to comment Tuesday and haven’t filed in the main docket on the proposal, 19-126. WISPA said last summer 15 of its members were winners Connect America Fund II reverse auction (see 1808290019).
The FCC is showing it understands “that the job isn’t done,” said Chris Nelson, vice chairman of the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, also on the call. “They are in fact moving forward to put census blocks into this next auction that haven’t been covered before or were not covered with a speed that is now considered essential,” he said. Addressing coverage doesn't require a “silver bullet,” but “silver buckshot,” said Indiana state Sen. Eric Koch (R), also on the call. “If there were a single answer, the digital divide would have been closed years ago,” he said.
The RDOF proposal would drop the 10/1 Mbps tier from previous programs entirely and favor gigabit access over 25/3 Mbps or 100/20 Mbps service to quality for a subsidy (see 1907110031). The program “can’t be static forever,” Nelson said. The threshold of 10 Mbps established for the Connect America Fund is “no longer substantial or where we need to be,” he said. “Those speeds are going to continue to ratchet up and so the parameters of the program need to change.” One question is whether lower speeds will suffice in areas that otherwise would have no broadband.
Nelson said the FCC should address low-cost census blocks, often just outside municipalities. “Because they have been identified as low cost, up to this point, there’s been no subsidy, yet the incumbents can’t make a business case and won’t build out,” he said. “They’ve literally been sitting there in limbo.”
Speakers stressed the importance of better mapping to improve how support is assigned. “We’re optimistic” about potential changes, Aiken said. “We’re committed to better mapping. We’re just committed to making sure it’s done in as streamlined of manner as possible.”
Nelson said he asked the FCC why it takes so long to make mapping data public. “One of the things they told me is the quality of the data that’s submitted to them is oftentimes so poor that they have to spend months working through it, reworking it, refining it, in order to make it publishable,” he said.
“We’re careful not to incentivize or allow overbuilding,” Koch said. In Indiana “we prioritize getting to the unserved before the underserved. Without the integrity we need from the data” it's unclear what the service levels are in some census tracts, he said. “As a steward of precious dollars, that becomes very important to us,” he said.
Nelson said things have improved in the eight years he has been a state commissioner. Then, a map of broadband coverage in South Dakota would have looked like “a 64-piece puzzle, with very, very large areas that are uncovered,” he said: Today it looks more like a 500-piece puzzle, he said: “The unserved areas are much smaller, they’re scattered.” The state needs current data to understand what the puzzle looks like today, he said.