The FCC has released more details of the revised Lifeline program order. It’s a long order and I won’t even try to summarize the order in this blog since the Internet will be full of such summaries in a few days.

Instead, I am going to highlight a few parts of the order that truly have me puzzled. The intent of the Lifeline order was to help to promote broadband adoption for low-income households. Unfortunately there are parts of the order that I think might accomplish the opposite of what is intended.

My primary beef with the plan (and it’s a huge one) is that the fund can be used to subsidize 3G cellular service. Not only that, but it will support cellular data plans with a monthly data cap of only 500 MB (half of 1 gigabit). This is mind-boggling to consider.

One of the stated purposes of the Lifeline plan is to help close the “homework gap” by providing data connections for school age children. What sort of homework gap does the FCC think it is closing with a 3G connection and a miniscule monthly data cap? The FCC is basically supporting a flip-phone data plan.

There has been a lot of recent press about how some broadband customers are now opting for mobile data over landline data, and I figure this has to mostly be to save money. The people who are choosing mobile data as their only option either aren’t big data users or else they have access during the day somebody’s WiFi on a landline data connection.

A few weeks ago I was in eastern Washington State at a hotel that had data speeds so slow that I couldn’t even open email. And so for two evenings I used my mobile data to connect my laptop. I didn’t watch any video and just conducted business, followed some election news and looked at Facebook a bit, and in two short evenings I used over 2.5 GB of data. It is impossible to use mobile data to do normal functions over the Internet.

And yet, somehow a family with school kids is supposed to be able to use a 3G mobile connection that has a data cap for the whole month of half of a gigabit? Have you ever tried opening a big web page on 3G? The FCC’s plan is beyond ludicrous. I’m picturing that AT&T and Verizon are either going to cut people off the Lifeline connection when they reach the tiny monthly cap or else they are going to nail the poorest households with data overage charges – and those households will end up spending more for mobile data than they do today.

I guess the FCC thinks the ½ gigabyte cap is too small and the cap will grow to 2 GB by the end of 2018. But even that will provide almost no real functionality for kids doing homework. I’m picturing kids watching assigned videos on their phone and using their monthly data cap on the first school day of the month. The FCC has caved in to special interests and has handed a huge revenue stream to the wireless carriers that is downright sickening. This one provision basically ruins the functionality of the Lifeline plan in my eyes because the wireless carriers are going to siphon off huge amounts of Lifeline fund for worthless data plans.

The other part of the plan that I dislike is the cap on wireline data. This requires that low income households be given connection speeds of at least 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. This is not great (and not broadband according to the FCC) but it is good enough for the homework gap. Yet anybody getting this assistance can still be subjected to a monthly data cap of 150 GB.

And so, a household today that might already have a data plan with no cap is going to get a data cap slapped on their household due to taking advantage of a $10 per month subsidy from the FCC. Comcast just raised their data caps to 1 TB (terabit), something that I was very happy to see. But now the FCC comes along and imposes a much smaller data cap on Lifeline landline connections. Should a customer who is paying $40 today for a data connection be penalized that heavily because they accept a $10 subsidy on their broadband? This feels vindictive to me, as if the sentiment is “No on-line video for you poor people!”

I honestly don’t understand why the FCC would impose data caps on Lifeline plans, and particularly don’t understand why they would impose data caps that are more stringent than what the carriers already have in place today. Hopefully the carriers will ignore these caps and let customers have the same cap as anybody else with the same plan. But I fear otherwise, and that makes the practical application of the Lifeline order pretty rotten in my mind.