Pew Research recently published an interesting Issue Brief on their website that explores the ideas of states continuing the work to ensure that there is widely available, lasting broadband in their state. It’s easy to forget that most of the giant federal broadband programs were generated as a result of the pandemic and the ensuring poor economy. If you listen to federal broadband policymakers, you’d think that broadband issues have been solved, but every state knows there are still a lot of people in their state who either don’t have access to good broadband or who can’t afford to buy it. Pew is asking states to continue the broadband effort and to not put broadband access on the back burner as an issue that has been solved.

Pew suggests what an ongoing state effort might look like if states want to develop long-term policies that ensure that citizens have access to good broadband today and into the future. Pew offers a framework of four policies for states to consider.

Broadband Deployment. Now that we are likely at the end of seeing any meaningful broadband infrastructure funding for many years to come, it’s going to be up to states to find funding to fill any remaining infrastructure gaps. Every state has them. There are still numerous low-income housing complexes and apartments that commercial ISPs are not willing to serve. There are still low-income neighborhoods that fiber ISPs are bypassing when they bring fiber to a community. There are still rural households who live at the end of long driveways that ISPs won’t serve, even when grants supposedly require them to do so. We’ve not seen the end of defaults by ISPs that have won broadband grants. And while NTIA won’t admit it, there are still a lot of places that were incorrectly excluded from broadband grants, either because of poor FCC broadband maps, or because of the drastically failed BEAD map challenge process. Pew is reminding states that if they don’t help to solve these gaps, nobody else will do so. While some of these problems will require some kind of infrastructure grant program, there are other ways that states can help to bring solutions to finally finish the infrastructure gap.

Broadband Affordability. This is a broadband issue that is being ignored at the federal level. Broadband affordability is only getting worse as inflation in housing, utilities, food, and health care keeps squeezing household budgets, making it harder to prioritize a broadband subscription over rent and food. We now know what a workable solution for affordability looks like. Congress created the Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP) that provided a $30 discount on broadband prices for low-income homes. Many of the largest ISPs used this plan to create broadband products that ended up being free or very inexpensive for households. We’ve now seen New Mexico create a program similar to ACP, while a few other states offer smaller broadband discounts. Pew is reminding states that if it’s really important to them for homes to be connected, then affordability programs have to be high on the list of solutions.

Higher Speed Minimums. The FCC established 100/20 Mbps as the definition of broadband and broadband grant programs latched onto that speed in defining technologies that could be grant-funded. To compound the speed issue, the FCC broadband maps allow ISPs to claim the speeds they can deliver, and there are numerous ISPs that claim they can deliver the FCC minimum speed while delivering something slower. Pew is reminding states that anything they do related to broadband should not focus on the bare minimum required speed today but should be forward-looking for what is coming in the foreseeable future. Everybody understands that an ISP that can only deliver 100/20 Mbps today is going to feel completely obsolete in a decade. Pew says states should have priorities that require much faster speeds than the FCC bare minimum requirement for any broadband efforts they support.

Network Scalability. Pew is using scalability to remind states that they should only support companies and technologies that can be scaled in size or scaled in speed without a major future reinvestment in the existing network. Pew says that if states don’t consider scalability, they will end up supporting ISPs or networks that will grow obsolete.

Pew says that 34 states have already adopted at least two of these four cornerstones as broadband goals. Pew warns states not to assume that the remaining construction in BEAD and RDOF are going to solve the infrastructure gaps, and that many of the other grant-funded networks will be unable to meet future speed and scalability goals. There has been talk in some states about shutting down their broadband offices now that broadband availability has been solved, and Pew is trying to remind them that is not the case.