FCC Consumer Advisory Committee Tackles E-rate, Role of Government in Broadband Adoption

"The economic literature suggests that households that have a student that goes to a school with high-speed broadband are 20 percent more likely to order broadband at home,” Rosenworcel said. “So I think of the E-rate program as being a really logical complement” to commission programs emphasizing the importance of broadband adoption, she said.

Survey data has shown that schools’ broadband connectivity does not meet their educational needs. Most schools get broadband at 3 Mbps or less, which is “by no means enough to teach the next generation of students the kind of science, technology, engineering and math skills that are necessary for the STEM and digital age.” Rosenworcel reiterated her vision of dreaming big, with a school bandwidth goal of 1 Gbps per 1,000 students by the end of the decade.

FCC Director of Digital Learning Michael Steffen was bullish on the likelihood of making big progress on digital education initiatives. “We have an Administration-wide push on this,” he said. “We have great support from the president,” as well as from the Secretaries of Education and Agriculture. “That creates a real window of opportunity here.” That’s important, he said, because if even a few students don’t have connectivity at home, that will limit the kind of instruction a teacher can provide.

FCC Chief Economist Steve Wildman discussed the ongoing transition from copper to fiber, wireline to wireless and TDM to Internet Protocol technology. The 1996 Telecom Act gives ILECs the ability to give notice and retire their copper as long as a fiber alternative exists, he said, but CLECs have been voicing concerns about this because their businesses often depend on purchasing unbundled network elements (UNEs) over that copper (CD April 18 p3). The commission is looking at the extent to which its and state public utility commissions’ UNE pricing policies “might contribute to the retirement of copper,” Wildman said.

Average annual broadband adoption growth rates are small, only 1.3 percent, Wildman said. Cable, fiber, DSL and satellite “already reach about 95 percent of all households,” he said. “You can’t grow much beyond that.” But when the commission talks of building out high-speed Internet, that’s “sort of a moving target” because of the changing definition of what constitutes high speed, he said. “The original definition was something like 200 kbps down, and then it moved to 800, and now we're talking about 4 megabits, but 4 megabits already seems dated, and we're talking about shifting that to 10, but even 10’s already starting to look dated because most of us have more than that,” he said.

Cost advantages of newer distribution technologies make it feasible to use wireless service in remote areas, Wildman said. People in “really remote areas” will probably depend on satellite service, but because of technical limitations and the need for a “double hop,” that makes real-time telephony difficult, he said, saying it will likely need to be supplemented by another technology.

Affordability is another concern, committee members said. USF money incents buildout of the infrastructure, but “that, by itself, does not address issues about income and affordability,” Wildman said. For programs to be effective, “we need to recognize the separability of the income issue from the cost issue.”

"It’s as unrealistic to assume that the marketplace is going to provide broadband that’s affordable and available … as to say that there’s no need for food stamps for poor people because the marketplace will work in such a way that provides food that’s accessible and low cost for everybody,” said Ken McEldowney, executive director of Consumer Action. “It’s just totally unrealistic.” The government needs to take a “much larger role” in terms of investment, infrastructure and devices, he said: Otherwise “poor and rural areas are going to continue to be left out for the foreseeable future.”