It’s hard for any broadband advocate to not agree with the suggestions Mr. Gillespie is making:
- He wants Congress to finish funding the new FCC mapping program to identify homes without access to broadband.
- He supports additional broadband grant funding for programs like the $20 billion RDOF grants.
- He supports Lifeline reform and says that it should be as easy for low-income homes to apply a Lifeline discount as it is to use a card to buy food from the SNAP program.
- He thinks funding should be increased for the Lifeline program and should be funded by Congress rather than funded through a 26% tax on interstate telephony.
I hope AT&T is serious about these proposals because having them lobby for these ideas would help to move the needle on digital inclusion. It’s just odd to see these positions from AT&T since they have spent a lot of effort and dollars arguing against some of these policies.
Mr. Gillespie complains that a lot of the current $9.25 Lifeline discount program is used by MVNOs and other carriers that have not built networks. That’s an ironic argument for AT&T to make since the company has done it’s best to walk away from the Lifeline program. AT&T no longer offers Lifeline in 14 states – AL, AR, FL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MS, NC, NV, SC, TN, and WI. AT&T still participates in Lifeline in 6 states, but only because those states refuse to allow the company to exit the Lifeline program.
Of course, this would not be an AT&T policy paper if the company didn’t pat itself on the back a bit. Mr. Gillespie brags that the ISP networks in the country weathered the big increase in web traffic due to the pandemic even though predictions were made that networks would collapse. He claims that AT&T made it through the pandemic due to light touch regulation. The fact is, once it was understood that the new traffic on the web was coming during the daytime when the network wasn’t busy, I don’t know any network engineer who thought that the web would collapse. I also wonder why AT&T would claim to have weathered the pandemic well – I would challenge AT&T to bring forth happy customers using AT&T DSL and ask for their testimonials on how the AT&T network enabled multiple people to work from home at the same time.
Mr. Gillespie is also calling for an expansion of the concepts used in the RDOF grants. Those grants provide funding for new broadband networks in rural areas that have the worse broadband. Before supporting an expansion of that grant program, I think many of us are holding judgment on the RDOF reverse auction process. While I think it’s likely that there will be beneficial grants given to those willing to build rural fiber networks, I also fear that a huge amount of these grants are going to be wasted on satellite broadband or other technologies that don’t bring rural broadband in line with urban broadband. I’m not ready to bless that grant program until we see how the reverse auction allocates money. I also can’t help being suspicious that AT&T’s position in favor of more grants reflects a hope to win billions of new grant dollars.
Interestingly, even though he never says it, the reforms that Mr. Gillespie is asking for require new broadband regulation. I’m sure that Mr. Gillespie must realize that bills needed from Congress for these reforms are not likely to stop with just AT&T’s wish list. We are long overdue for a new telecommunications act that brings broadband regulation in line with today’s reality. The last such law was passed at a time when people were flocking to AOL for dial-up access. It’s highly likely that new telecom legislation is going to go beyond what AT&T is calling for. It’s likely that new legislation will give some broadband regulating authority back to the FCC and will likely include some version of net neutrality. It’s ironic to see arguments for a stronger FCC when the FCC walked away from regulating broadband at the urging of AT&T and the other giant ISPs. Perhaps even AT&T knows it went too far with deregulation.