US Digital Divide Shrinks a Lot, Says FCC – Really, Though?

Service providers have delivered fixed-access broadband to about 5.6 million previously unconnected Americans, marking a more than 25% decrease in members of the US's digital divide, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

The draft of the 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai shared with commissioners on Feb. 19, showed 19.4 million Americans lacked access to a fixed broadband connection of at least 25 Mbit/s down / 3 Mbit/s upstream by year-end 2017, compared with 26.1 million at the end of 2016. Most who gained access to this connectivity live in rural counties, according to the report.

"For the past two years, closing the digital divide has been the FCC's top priority," said Pai in a statement. "We've been tackling this problem by removing barriers to infrastructure investment, promoting competition and providing efficient, effective support for rural broadband expansion through our Connect America Fund."

In 2018, operators deployed fiber to 5.9 million homes, the FCC said. The agency also reported service providers' capital expenditures increased in 2017 compared to declines in 2015 and 2016 -- a statement widely disputed by opponents to the FCC's reversal of Title II -- a.k.a. the Open Internet Order -- which established net neutrality, among other rules.

Through the end of 2017, the number of Americans with access to 100 Mbit/s / 10 Mbit/s fixed broadband increased by nearly 20%, to 290.9 million, from 244.3 million, the report said. And those who could access speeds of 250 Mbit/s / 50 Mbit/s on fixed broadband rose over 45%, to 205.2 million, the commission wrote.

Mixing it up
Gigabit fiber deployments are becoming increasingly common from coops, municipalities and utilities that recognize their area's need for high-speed infrastructure and a lack of urgency from external providers that do not see a revenue stream from sparsely populated regions.

Funding for infrastructure is one thing, but these deployments live and breathe long after the last cable is pulled or router is installed. Maintenance and customer service calls, upgrades and updates will continue; automation helps, but faraway subscribers still add up to more expensive overhead for many.

It seems not all operators that have taken CAF II funds have yet to achieve their goals, according to the Benton Foundation. CenturyLink received funding to improve broadband in 1 million homes and businesses across 33 states, and says it's met a 60% milestone in 23 states. However, it has not attained that status in 11 states: Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin.

For its part, Frontier Communications -- which got CAF II funds to improve more than 774,000 locations in 29 states -- reached the 60% milestone in 27 states, but has yet to hit that goal in Nebraska and New Mexico.

While some rural communities' connectivity resides on fiber infrastructure, early CAF II deployments were DSL-dependent, according to Doug Dawson, president of CCG Consulting, which specializes in assisting small communications carriers. Now those most easily accessible non-urban regions are addressed, the remainder are more expensive, complex and time-consuming -- and, therefore, might well become neglected, he wrote in a blog.

Some big telcos have only targeted low-hanging fruit, he wrote. Others have only spent a small amount of CAF II funds on rural deployments, Dawson added. And some customers who are in serviced regions do not see speeds that meet the FCC's definition of "high-speed Internet," he said.

"The CAF II program will be finished soon and I'm already wondering how the telcos are going to report the results to the FCC if they took shortcuts and didn’t make all of the CAF II upgrades. Will they say they've covered everybody when some homes saw no improvement?" wrote Dawson. "Will they claim 10/1 Mbps speeds when many households were upgraded to something slower? If they come clean, how will the FCC react? Will the FCC try to find the truth or sweep it under the rug?"

The FCC has said it now requires proof for CAF II funding (indeed, ADTRAN and Calix recently began offering software that helps operators manage and track these requirements). At the same time, the agency usurped another department's role in mapping broadband deployments and did away with a data-collection form used to track the cable industry.

As the FCC and many others agree, connectivity and communications are too important to mess up. The government is spending billions and billions of taxpayer money on vitally important infrastructure few begrudge -- but they must ensure it's spent wisely; monitored for fraud and malfeasance; and invested in the same forward-looking ways a city, enterprise or financially savvy family would use with its own funds.

Related posts:

• FCC No Longer Requires Cable Data Under Oath
• FCC: Mobile Broadband 'No Substitute' for Fixed Service
• New FCC Fraud Division Focuses on USF Programs

— Alison Diana, Editor, Broadband World News. Follow us on Twitter or @alisoncdiana.