WISPA Says BEAD Focus on Fiber Will Drive Up Costs as Much as $60B
The Wireless ISP Association released a paper Thursday arguing that NTIA’s notice of funding opportunity for its broadband, equity, access and deployment program is biased against WISPs and wireless, and promotes “bad policy.” WISPA is working to overcome NTIA resistance to funding projects that rely partly on using unlicensed spectrum (see 2301230052). By designating fiber as a “priority broadband project” for deployments, NTIA will drive up the cost of closing the digital divide by as much as $60 billion, the paper said.
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The NTIA’s approach is “very seriously flawed,” the paper’s author William Lehr told reporters Thursday. The approach abandons “what has been established, sound regulatory policy for telecommunications for decades,” said Lehr, research associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The NTIA order is choosing winners and that’s not what good government policy should do,” Lehr said. “The whole point” of the BEAD program is that the world is entering a “digital economy,” he said. To compete in that economy the U.S. and other nations are trying to ensure they have the infrastructure they need, he said. The COVID-19 pandemic made even “more clear” the importance of broadband, he said. NTIA didn't comment.
The BEAD program provides $42 billion “which is a lot of money to try and address the last few percent of folks who don’t have access to reliable, quality broadband today,” Lehr said. The places don’t have broadband because they’re expensive to serve “and if you do it with fiber, it’s really a lot more costly,” he said. Fiber also will take as long as an additional two years to deploy, he said: “You’ve got to do a lot of other stuff like dig up roads,” he said. With fiber, you need access to conduits and other infrastructure, which is tied by states to other infrastructure plans, he said.
The group asked Lehr to write the paper because in the history of such programs it has never seen one “that has so abandoned the principle of technology neutrality to this degree,” said Louis Peraertz, WISPA vice president-policy. “Our motto is the right tool for the right job,” he said.
WISPA supported the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 “because it was technology neutral,” Peraertz said. “By the plain language of the act, we thought all broadband technologies would be fairly considered,” he said. States may seek waivers of the rules to allow wireless buildouts, he said. WISPA hopes the paper will be useful to states that choose to pursue waivers, he said.
“As framed, the BEAD NOFO is heavily biased to favor and fund Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) projects,” the paper said, noting that wasn't required by Congress when it funded the BEAD program. “‘FTTP-only’ or ‘FTTP-first’ is inconsistent with optimal planning for U.S. essential and critical digital infrastructure and promoting efficient market competition and consumer choice,” the paper says. The NTIA’s approach will drive up the cost of reaching the unserved with broadband “while offering no compensating advantages,” the paper said.
Fiber and fixed wireless are complementary technologies, the paper argues. It notes U.S. carriers already spend more than $75 billion each year on their networks, a combined $2 trillion since 1996: “To make sure that the BEAD funding is used efficiently and not misallocated, it is important that NTIA rules for allocating those funds be based on sound economic and policy principles. Unfortunately, that is not the case presently.”