At the recent Mobile World Congress, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that one of his reasons he wants to reverse Title II regulation is that it has had a drastic impact on capital spending by ISPs. He says that the new regulations have been a disincentive for the ISPs to invest in broadband.

The Chairman bases that position on statistics provided by USTelecom which are based upon work done by Hal Singer, a Senior Fellow at GW Institute for Public Policy. Mr. Singer created the following table that shows the domestic capital spending for the big ISPs for 2014 through 2016. And indeed, this table shows a 5.6% drop, or $3.6 billion a year from 2014 to 2016 – which Mr. Singer attributes to Title II regulation.

But like with all statistics, it’s not hard to draw different conclusions from the same set of numbers. For example, all of the drop in capital spending can be attributed to AT&T and Sprint. Taking those companies out of the table shows that capital spending for the other big ISPs is up $2.1 billion or 5% from 2014 to 2016.

So what’s going on with AT&T? There are a number of reasons for their change in capital spending:

·         During these same years the company made massive capital investments in DirecTV ($3 billion over the last few years) and also on the company’s purchase and expansion of its cellular network into Mexico ($3 billion over 4 years). Those numbers are not included in the above table and it’s easy to argue that the company just set different priorities and diverted normal domestic capital to these two giant ventures. If you add those capital expenditures into the table then AT&T’s capital spending has grown – just not their ‘domestic’ spending on traditional broadband.

·         AT&T has been making a huge effort to update its cellular network using software defined networking (SDN) as described at this AT&T website. They have been decommissioning traditional hardware at cell sites and installing much less expensive, off-the-shelf routers that can now control the cell sites from centralized data centers. They have already converted over half of their cell sites and this upgrade means vastly reduced spending on traditional cell site electronics. The company has been bragging about this shift to investors for several years.

·         AT&T has also retracted from expanding traditional big tower cell sites. For a number of years AT&T has been spending money to get fiber to its more remote cell sites, and that upgrade is largely done.

Sprint can also be easily explained. This is a company in trouble and that has been well documented over the last few years. A number of attempts to find a buyer has fallen through. What’s not shown on this table is that in 2013 (the year before the table begins) Sprint spent $6.4 billion on capital in a massive system-wide upgrade to LTE. Since then the company has very publicly stated that they are cutting capital spending to conserve cash. The company is only expanding now with carefully selected small cell deployments. But the company is clearly in network maintenance mode and is spending only what is needed to keep the cell sites functioning. Also included in the drop in spending is a change in the way that Sprint treats leased cellphones – they used to capitalize the phones and they now expense them.

There are going to be further decreases in future telecom capital spending across the industry. I expect capital spending for all four big wireless companies to keep decreasing due to efficiencies from SDN. We are now seeing a burst of spending from cable companies due to upgrades to DOCSIS 3.1, but when that’s done I would expect a significant decline in their capital spending as well. We are entering a time when improvements in software will lower the need for new hardware – not just in telecom, but in many other sectors as well.

I have always been annoyed when statistics are used to falsely justify public policy. There is no evidence that the big ISPS have changed their spending habits in any drastic way due to Title II regulations. The argument that Title II has affected capital spending comes directly from constant press releases from USTelecom, and the FCC Chairman should be above repeating arguments from lobbyists. If the FCC wants to undo Title II then it should just do it – there are a number of valid reasons why this might be good policy. But it’s disingenuous to cook up false reasons for why the change is needed.