There is a bill making its way through Congress that ought to be of interest to the carrier community. It’s called the Broadband Conduit Deployment Act of 2015. It’s a bipartisan bill being sponsored by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Greg Walden (R-OR).
In a nutshell this requires that all federally funded highway construction projects include the installation of empty fiber conduits in cases where it is determined that an area has a need for broadband in the fifteen years after the construction. I have no idea who makes this determination.
There are a number of cities and counties around the country that have had this policy in place and it works, albeit slowly. People don’t realize it, but most local roads get rebuilt to some degree every thirty years, and so every year about 3% to 4% of roads in an area ought to be getting rebuilt. That number varies according to weather conditions in different parts of the country and according to how heavily a road is used. Roads that carry a lot of overweight loads wear out a lot faster. But federal interstate highways are built to a higher standard and are expected in many parts of the country to last up to forty years. And there are now some stretches of interstate highways that are fifty years old.
One has to wonder about how quickly there might be benefit from such a policy. Certainly any conduit put into urban stretches of highway would probably be grabbed up. But in a lot of places it might be a decade or more until the new conduit provides any real benefit. Once you get out of urban areas conduit is mostly used for long haul fiber, and so have having a patchwork of conduits here and there isn’t going to get many carriers excited.
But over time such a system will provide benefits as more and more stretches of a highway get empty conduits. The same thing has happened in the cities that have this policy. They hoped for a quick benefit for broadband when they introduced this kind of ordinance, but it often takes many years until there is enough conduit available to get any fiber provider excited. The place where almost any empty conduit is of immediate interest is if it runs through neighborhoods, because saving any construction costs on the last mile matters to a fiber builder.
The law is silent on how this conduit would be made available. I’ve worked with getting rights to government-owned fiber before and it has always been difficult. The government owner of a conduit doesn’t have the same sense of urgency as a carrier who is trying to build a fiber route. If you have to wait too long to get access to conduit you’re probably better off finding a different solution.
But it’s step in the right direction and over time this will produce benefits in some places. I also don’t know exactly what kind of roads qualify as receiving federal highway funding assistance. Obviously all interstate highways meet that test. But I’ve sat through many city council meetings where I’ve heard that state highway projects sometime get some federal funding assistance. If so, then this greatly expands the scope and potential of the law.
Similar bills have been bouncing around in congress since 2006 and never passed for one reason or the other. The White House is in favor of this bill as one more piece of the puzzle in promoting more broadband. The White House tried to implement an abbreviated version of this idea a few years ago through executive order, but apparently the implementation of that has been very spotty.
Like many good ideas that work their way up to Congress, this bill is probably twenty years too late. If this had been implemented at the time of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 then we would already have conduit all over the country that would provide cheaper transport. But I guess you have to start somewhere, so I hope this bill becomes law.