I cringe every time I see the term “technology neutral”. Over the last few years, NTIA has morphed the phrase into a euphemism to mean we should favor the cheapest technology over the best technology.
And it clearly is a euphemism meant to disguise the true nature of the broadband policy discussion from those not involved in the topic every day. Governments have gotten so good at developing such phrases that the euphemisms replace the right language and become common usage. We routinely hear phrases like revenue enhancement instead of tax increase, or negative growth instead of losses without fully realizing what is not being said.
The phrase technology neutral didn’t start as a euphemism. It comes from a policy paper issued during the Clinton Administration, “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce“, which used the term “technology-neutral” to warn that governments shouldn’t get involved in trying to steer the technology direction for the budding Internet industry. The Administration at the time believed that a hands-off market approach would best allow the Internet to develop. It turns out they were right.
It seems pretty clear that the term was tossed into the IIJA legislation as a bone for WISPs. They badly wanted to participate in BEAD and used the term technology-neutral to plant the idea that all technologies that could deliver speeds of 100/20 Mbps were all equivalent. Until Tarana came out with much faster radios, the fixed wireless technology at the time didn’t deserve to be considered for long-term grants – and sure enough, five years later, the older radios have already joined DSL and other older technologies in the obsolete technology trash bin.
I’ve been searching for a good analogy for the current use of technology neutral and think I have one. Consider a tiny village that is not connected to the power grid. There is a wide range of technology solutions for providing homes with heat and light. The village could be given a self-sufficient solar power farm. They could be connected to a nuclear power plant. They could be given an obsolete coal-powered plant being decommissioned from somewhere else. Each home could be given a gas generator. They could be provided with the low-tech option of fireplaces and axes to chop firewood.
The various technology choices are clearly different in terms of cost and effectiveness. The NTIA technology neutral position would say that all of these options are acceptable, as long as they deliver heat and light to the homes today and also will deliver heat and light in the foreseeable future. If there were a government grant to bring heat and light to the towns that operated under the NTIA rules, the decision would be made on cost, since all of the solutions are considered to be technology-neutral. I don’t think the rural residents would be thrilled with their government-subsidized axes.
Don’t mistake this as a rant for building fiber instead of other broadband technologies. In the example, it would be extreme to build the most expensive solutions, like a nuclear power plant. I don’t know anybody who supports the idea of spending huge amounts of money to bring broadband to a small number of places. Going back to the village in my example, there are a lot of options between a nuclear power plant and fireplaces.
The real problem I have with the term technology neutral is that it says that all broadband technologies are the same, and they clearly are not. Starlink is not equivalent to fiber for a small community. For one thing, fiber can be used for a lot of other purposes that can benefit the community beyond bringing home broadband. Using a euphemism is a way to disguise the real discussion that should be held at State Broadband Offices – what can be afforded for the funding that is available. I think States were mostly doing that, but the shift to the lowest-cost solution ended all logical deliberation.
As we saw in the first BEAD award from Louisiana, which was done under the original BEAD rules, the State still awarded satellite technology for some locations, because that was the most sensible solution for those places. But when the rules got reshuffled to impose technology neutrality, deliberate decisions of the broadband office were replaced with a simple cost comparison.
Technology neutral telecom policy dates to the 1996 Telecom Act. It afforded the incumbent telephone companies an out from modernizing their analog copper POTS delivery infrastructure to fiber. Predicated on the notion that technological competition would come up with a better mousetrap to build then VP Al Gore’s “information superhighway” that wasn’t built.
This policy is the root source of the ongoing infrastructure deficiencies and current controversy over BEAD since as this post notes, tech neutrality was also included in the IIJA. Here’s the language from the 1996 Telecom Act:
(2) ADVANCED SERVICES- The Commission shall establish
competitively neutral rules–
`(A) to enhance, to the extent technically feasible and
economically reasonable, access to advanced
telecommunications and information services for all public
and nonprofit elementary and secondary school classrooms,
health care providers, and libraries;
I think it’s important to separate out infrastructure from broadband.
infrastructure being long-haul fiber and even mid-haul fiber bringing high capacity connectivity to areas. Today, ‘ptp’ fiber is essentially exclusively capable of this. There are some wireless techs that are passable with up to 3-4Gbps but really this is where fiber shines and investing in anything else seems really short sighted except for corner cases.
broadband in this context needs to be essentially last-mile plus intermediate links and infrastructure. a GPON plant is infrastructure in one side, broadband out the other. A WISP is often infrastructure to a core site, then some intermediate links to towers and then last-mile.
These should be technology agnostic. Fiber has strengths and weaknesses and celluar FWA and traditional FWA also have strengths and weaknesses, and combined they start stacking up strenths.
For instance, traditional FWA from quality operators tends to have the shortest downtimes because repairs are often cable to be made quickly, and rings/redundancies are much eaier. However, having many more distribution points means statistically more power issues to contend with and so might have more small outages. WISPs are typically buying DIA or transport/transit products that are on large carrier rings, and often have their own diversity in links from large carriers.
Fiber has fewer ‘technology’ based outages (i’m excluding operator error) but when there is an outages, it’s often very long sometimes stretching out days. The tree topology of *PON and the tree topology often used to feed *PON dictates this. When talking about broadband fiber, we’re nearly exclusively talking about a *PON kit, not active ethernet or DIA rings. And so when a cut happens on a primary trunk of the tree, they have to roll a splice truck and often do 2 rounds of splices cutting out the damaged section with backhoes and a crew of people running shovels etc. In contrast most WISP or Cellular FWA is a single person taking a piece of replacement hardware, cables, or generator/fuel to a site.
I think one flaw in the current model is awarding funding to single providers for groups of BSLs when what would benefit many people more is having multiple options so they can have diversity in services if needed, and they buy services in a competative market.
When you start having many options available (especially when none of them are subsidized) they have to compete with each other on price, plus those outages I described are all but erased for those that have critical connectivity needs because the changes of 2 providers having simultaneous issues is low. We offer business cellular, WISP, or starlink failover and we offer our WISP residential customers cellular FWA failover in our managed wifi systems so if they do have critical needs they can stay online with minimal disruptions.