Tag Archives: broadband grants

Only Twenty Years

I’ve written several blogs that make the argument that we should only award broadband grants based on future-looking broadband demand. I think it is bad policy to provide federal grant funding for any technology that delivers speeds that are already slower than the speeds already available to most broadband customers in the country.

The current BEAD grants currently use a definition of 100/20 Mbps to define who households that aren’t considered to have broadband today. But inexplicably, the BEAD grants then allow grant winners to build technologies that deliver that same 100/20 Mbps speeds. The policymakers who designed the grants would allow federal funding to go to a new network that, by definition, sits at the nexus between served and unserved today. That is a bad policy for so many reasons that I don’t even know where to begin lambasting it.

One way to demonstrate the shortsightedness of that decision is a history lesson. Almost everybody in the industry tosses out a statistic that a fiber network built today should be good for at least thirty years. I think that numbers is incredibly low and that modern fiber ought to easily last for twice that time. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept a thirty-year life of fiber.

Just over twenty years ago, I lived inside the D.C. Beltway, and I was able to buy 1 Mbps DSL from Verizon or from a Comcast cable modem. I remember a lot of discussion at the time that there wouldn’t be a need for upgrades in broadband speeds for a while. The 1 Mbps speed from the telco and cable company was an 18-times increase in speed over dial-up, and that seemed to provide a future-proof cushion against homes needing more broadband. That conclusion was quickly shattered when AOL and other online content providers took advantage of the faster broadband speeds to flood the Internet with picture files that used all of the speed. It took only a few years for 1 Mbps per second to feel slow.

By 2004, I changed to a 6 Mbps download offering from Comcast – they never mentioned the upload speed. This was a great upgrade over the 1 Mbps DSL. Verizon made a huge leap forward in 2004 and introduced Verizon FiOS on fiber. That product didn’t make it to my neighborhood until 2006, at which time I bought a 30 Mbps symmetrical connection on fiber. In 2006 I was buying broadband that was thirty times faster than my DSL from 2000. Over time, the two ISPs got into a speed battle. Comcast had numerous upgrades that increased speeds to 12 Mbps, then 30 Mbps, 60 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, and most recently 1.2 Gbps. Verizon always stayed a little ahead of cable download speeds and continued to offer much faster upload speeds.

The explosion of broadband demand after the introduction of new technology should be a lesson for us. An 18-time speed increase from dial-up to DSL seemed like a huge technology leap, but public demand for faster broadband quickly swamped that technology upgrade, and 1 Mbps DSL felt obsolete almost as soon as it was deployed. It seems that every time there has been a technology upgrade that the public found a way to use the greater capacity.

In 2010, Google rocked the Internet world by announcing gigabit speeds. That was a 33-time increase over the 30 Mbps download speeds offered at the time by the cable companies. The cable companies and telcos said at the time that nobody needed speeds that fast and that it was a marketing gimmick (but they all went furiously to work to match the faster fiber speeds).

I know homes and businesses today that are using most of the gigabit capacity. That is still a relatively small percentage of homes, but the number is growing. Over twenty years, the broadband use by the average home has skyrocketed, and the average U.S. home now uses almost 600 gigabytes of broadband per month – a number that would have been unthinkable in the early 2000s.

I look at this history, and I marvel that anybody would think that it’s wise to use federal funds to build a 100/20 Mbps network today. Already today, something like 80% of homes in the country can buy a gigabit broadband product. The latest OpenVault report says that over a quarter of homes are already subscribing to gigabit speeds. Why would we contemplate using federal grants to build a network with a tenth of the download capacity that is already available to most American homes today?

The answer is obvious. Choosing the technologies that are eligible for grant funding is a political decision, not a technical or economic one. There are vocal constituencies that want some of the federal grant money, and they have obviously convinced the folks who wrote the grant rules that they should have that chance. The biggest constituency lobbying for 100/20 Mbps was the cable companies, which feared that grants could be used to compete against their slow upload speeds. But just as cable companies responded to Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber, the cable companies are now planning for a huge leap upward in upload speeds. WISPs and Starlink also lobbied for the 100/20 Mbps grant threshold, although most WISPs seeking grant funding are now also claiming much faster speed capabilities.

If we learn anything from looking back twenty years, it’s that broadband demand will continue to grow, and that homes in twenty years will use an immensely greater amount of broadband than today. I can only groan and moan that the federal rules allow grants to be awarded to technologies that can deliver only 100/20 Mbps. But I hope that state Broadband Grant offices will ignore that measly, obsolete, politically-absurd option and only award grant funding to networks that might still be serving folks in twenty years.

Congress, Don’t Be Too Hasty

As Congress is handing out relief money for the COVID-19 crisis, rumors are flying around that rural broadband relief is one of the issues being discussed. The plight of employees and students unable to work from home has certainly bubbled up to a majority of those in Congress.

My advice to Congress is to not be to hasty. Don’t have the knee-jerk reaction of just tossing big bucks towards the rural broadband problem, because if you do much of the money will be wasted. There have been back-of-the-envelope estimates made that it would take anywhere from $60 billion to well over $100 billion to bring fiber to everywhere in rural America. Nobody knows the number and my guess is that it’s towards the upper end of that scale.

The typical Washington DC approach to the problem would be to earmark a pile of money to solve the problem, with no forethought of how to use the funds. This tendency is bolstered by the fiscal year spending nature of government funding, and Congress would likely expect broadband money to be spent quickly.

And that’s where the rub comes in. The broadband industry is not prepared to handle a sudden huge influx of funding. Consider all of the following issues that would quickly become apparent if this were to happen:

  • The first big question that would be asked with funding is where to spend the money – which parts of the country need the funding help? Unfortunately, the FCC will be of nearly zero help in this area, so you can’t run a giant grant program through them. The upcoming RDOF grants are supposedly aimed at bringing broadband to all of the places that don’t already have 25/3 broadband. But due to the dismal FCC mapping process, the current maps miss huge swaths of rural America that also need better broadband but that are misclassified by the FCC maps. If Congress gives the money to the FCC to disperse, the agency has no idea where to spend it according to its flawed data.
  • The next big question is how to award funds. The FCC’s RDOF grant program is using a reverse auction to award funds – but this only works when the funding is awarded to a specific footprint of grant areas. More traditional grant awards require the writing of extensive grant requests to prove the worthiness of a grant applicant and the worthiness of grant project. Anybody that remembers the Stimulus grants for broadband recalls that even at that time there were almost no qualified and experienced people available to review grant applications – and a lot of the Stimulus funding went to unworthy projects. A poorly run grant program also invites fraud and waste – the bigger the dollars the bigger the problems.
  • In perhaps the hardest issue for many to believe, there are not enough qualified ISPs ready and able to handle a big influx of funding and of operating the ensuing broadband businesses. We hear about small ISPs offering service all over the country, but all of them together don’t serve more than perhaps 5% of the broadband customers in the country today. Most small ISPs are already fully leveraged today as they’ve borrowed money to expand their footprint. Any grants that require matching funds might find a dearth of takers. If we throw money at the industry too quickly, it’s going to all end up going to the big telcos – and that likely just means pouring money down a black hole. It’s not hard to look back at the total bust of the CAF II program where the big telcos spent $11 billion in FCC funding and didn’t make any dent in the rural broadband problem. If Congress spreads awards out over time, then big new ISPs like electric cooperatives can prepare to go after the awards – most of them are not close to ‘shovel-ready’ today.
  • You can’t ask for broadband funding without some sort of engineering estimate of the cost of building a network and some sort of business plan showing that the network can operate profitably at the end of the funding. There are not a lot of ‘shovel-ready’ broadband projects laying around waiting for funding, and so the first step after a big Congress funding program would be to develop hundreds of new business plans. All of the consultants and engineers I know are already full-time busy helping companies to prepare for the $16.4 billion RDOF grants and the various state grant awards around the country.
  • The same is true of fiber construction companies. During this last construction season, we started seeing construction companies bidding up rates to go to the builder willing to pay the most for their services. There are not a lot (if any) idle fiber construction crews sitting around waiting for work. Fiber construction is not something that can be taught quickly to new workers – it takes years to develop a good fiber splicer or to train somebody to be able to determine pole make-ready.
  • We’re also starting to see backlogs for fiber materials. The waiting times for ADSS fiber that goes into the power space recently crept up to six months. The far bigger concern is electronics. Right now, the world supply chains are a mess due to COVID-19 and the industry is expecting delays in electronics delivery in the coming construction season. Supply houses and vendors aren’t talking about this, hoping it will magically go away, but there will likely be electronics shortages in the 2020 construction season even without pressure from new grants. Such shortages can cripple construction projects.
  • Finally, I am positive that any federal broadband grant money will come with stupid rules, many slapped on the funding by the big ISP lobbyists. There will be needless hoops to jump through and rules that make it hard to spend the money well. There is zero chance that federal grant funding wouldn’t come with ridiculous rules and ridiculous restrictions. If Congress is going to award big money they need to take a little time that the rules are fair and efficient.

There will be people reading this in amazement and wondering how a rural broadband advocate could be recommending caution. One only has to look back to the stimulus grants to recall that probably half of that money was wasted due to the haste of the grant programs. My fear is a knee-jerk federal reaction that will throw giant bucks at the problem when the proper solution would be a series of grants awarded over five or more years to allow ISPs time to get ready. Funding in one giant lump would result in a mess of epic proportions. I fear that DC would then wash their hands of rural broadband by saying that they already funded it, and any communities left behind after a flawed grant program would likely be left behind for decades to come. Congress, if you want to help your constituents, please ask for advice and get it right.

FCC Proposes Rules for $20.4 Billion Broadband Grants

On August 2 the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposes rules for the upcoming grant program that will award $20.4 billion for rural broadband. Since every FCC program needs a name, this grant program is now designated as the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). An NPRM is theoretically only a list of suggestions by the FCC, and there is a comment period that will commence 30 days after the NPRM is posted in the Federal Register. However, realistically, the rules that are proposed in the NPRM are likely to be the rules of the grant program. Here are a few of the highlights:

Timing of Award. The FCC proposes awarding the money in two phases. The Phase I award will be awarded late next year and will award over $16 billion. The Phase II will award will follow and award the remaining $4.4 billion. I know a lot of folks were hoping for a $2 billion annual grant award – but most of the money will be awarded next year. Anybody interested in this program should already be creating a network design and a financial business plan because the industry resources to create business plans are going to soon be too busy to help.

The money will be paid out to grant recipients over 10 years, similar to the ACAM program for small telcos. Grant recipients need to understand the time value of money. If an ISP wins a $1 million grant and borrows money at a rate of 5.5% interest, then the actual value of the grant in today’s dollars is a little more than $750,000.

Areas Eligible for Award. The Phase I auction will only be awarded in areas that are wholly unserved using the definition of broadband as 25/3 Mbps or faster. The areas covered can’t have anybody capable of getting broadband faster than that. The FCC is likely to publish a list of areas eligible for the Phase I grants. Unfortunately, the FCC will use its flawed mapping program to make this determination. This is likely to mean that many parts of the country that ought to be eligible for these grants might not be part of the program.

Phase II is likely to be targeted at areas that did not see awards in Phase I. One of the open questions in the NPRM that is not yet firm is the size of award areas. The NPRM asks if the minimum coverage area should be a census block or a county. It also asks if applicants can bundle multiple areas into one grant request.

The FCC is considering prioritizing areas it thinks are particularly needy. For example, it may give extra grant weighting to areas that don’t yet have 10/1 Mbps broadband. The FCC is also planning on giving extra weighting to some tribal areas.

Weighting for Technology. Like with the CAF II reverse auction, the grant program is going to try to give priority to faster broadband technologies. The FCC is proposing extra weighting for technologies that can deliver at least 100 Mbps and even more weighting for technologies that can deliver gigabit speeds. They are also proposing a grant disincentive for technologies with a latency greater than 100 milliseconds.

Use of Funds. Recipients will be expected to complete construction to 40% of the grant eligible households by the end of the third year, with 20% more expected annually and the whole buildout to be finished by the end of the sixth year.

Reverse Auction. The FCC is proposing a multi-round, descending clock reverse auction so that bidders who are willing to accept the lowest amount of subsidy per passing will win the awards. This is the same process used in the CAF II reverse auctions.

Overall Eligibility. It looks like the same rules for eligibility will apply as with previous grants. Applicants must be able to obtain Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) status to apply, meaning they must be a facilities-based retail ISP. This will exclude entities such as open access networks where the network owner is a different entity than the ISP. Applicants will also need to have a financial track record, meaning start-up companies need not apply. Applicants must also provide proof of financing.

Measurement Requirements. Grant winners will be subject to controlled speed tests to see if they are delivering what was promised. The FCC is asking if they should keep the current test – where only 70% of customers must meet the speed requirements for an applicant to keep full funding.

I see problems with a few of these requirements that I’ll cover in upcoming blogs.

An Effective Federal Broadband Program, Part 4

outdoor-indoor-cable-161This is the final in a series of ideas on establishing a federal broadband construction program. It is assumed in these comments that such a program would include some form of federal financial assistance to build fiber networks such as grants, loans or loan guarantees.

Fix the Pole Problem. One of the biggest impediments I see for building fiber is getting reasonable access to poles. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 established the right to get on commercially-owned utility poles. But that new set of rules excluded poles owned by municipalities and rural electric cooperatives. Those exclusions need to be ended.

But the biggest problem with pole access is that there is no remedy for dealing with pole owners that are uncooperative or that fight the connections. Recalcitrant pole owners can easily destroy a business plan through delays. There are states that have solved this issue by allowing a new connector to build without permission if a pole owner takes too long to respond to a request for connection – and the FCC should adopt something similar. In areas where it’s too expensive to bury fiber, access to poles is the only way to bring real broadband.

The Financing Dilemma. The stimulus grants and other grant and loan programs have generally required that an applicant has already lined up the rest of the financing required to complete the project. This is a great example of the chicken and the egg dilemma in that most financial institutions are not going to expend their resources to thoroughly review a loan applications until the applicant cam prove the remainder of the funding (the grant). This one requirement stopped a lot of good projects from asking for stimulus funding because they were stuck in financial limbo between bankers and the federal government that each wanted the other side to commit first. Obviously a grant can be paid until all of the funding is in place, but there must be a reasonable time allowed to secure financing after a grant award.

Don’t be Afraid to Impose Policy Objectives. The stimulus grants imposed a handful of rules that were meant to benefit the public good. For instance, they made middle-mile fiber builders serve ‘anchor institutions’ such as schools, city halls and other government institutions.

But if large amounts of federal monies are given for building last mile fiber then there should be some requirements imposed on funding recipients to meet important broadband social goals. This might include a few things like:

  • A Robust Low-Income Broadband Product. Anybody taking federal funding for fiber should be mandated to participate in the federal broadband Lifeline program to provide affordable broadband to low-income homes. Today carriers participating in the Lifeline program are allowed to offer horrendously slow speeds to customers – 10/1 Mbps for wireline connections. If somebody is taking federal money to build fiber, then Lifeline speeds ought to always at least be at whatever is determined by the FCC to be broadband, which is currently 25/3 Mbps.  Further, the current Lifeline products have FCC sanctioned small data caps that punish customers for using the Lifeline broadband. The monthly cap is 150 gigabits for landline, and an unbelievably small ½ gigabit for cellular. These stingy data caps invalidate the stated purpose of the Lifeline program which is to enable low-income households to benefit from a broadband connection. These caps ignore the basic cost drivers of the industry and there is virtually no cost difference between a household using 150 GB per month and one using 500 GB per month. These caps are social policy decisions, not ones based upon the economics of the industry.
  • No Data Caps. Again, if the federal government pays a significant portion of the cost to build a fiber network, then that network should impose no data caps on any customers at any speeds. Data caps are a way to say to customers – here is broadband, just don’t use it. Data caps are clearly a way to extract more money out of customers over and above the base broadband rates.

An Effective Federal Broadband Program, Part 3

outdoor-indoor-cable-161This is the third in my series of blogs looking at the best way to administer a federal broadband construction program. Since there is talk of having an infrastructure program that might include money for broadband, I hope that the folks at places like the NTIA are giving these issues some thought. The last time around the stimulus grants caught them and the whole industry by surprise. But this time, with some advanced thought and planning we can do better and get more bang from any federal dollars. After all, if there is a broadband program, it ought to have the number one goal of bringing broadband to as many people as possible. Following are some additional thoughts on structuring a federal program:

Consider Local Conditions More. The stimulus grants included a simplistic formula that offered different levels of grant funding to served and underserved communities. We need to get more sophisticated this time around and realize that the cost of broadband networks has a lot more to do with terrain and density than it does with whether customers are served or unserved. There is a huge difference in the cost to reach an unserved customer in the open plains of the Midwest compared to Appalachia. And other local conditions like the state of poles can make a big difference in cost. The CAF II funding took a stab at the differences by using proxy cost models to try to reflect the relative cost to construct in different parts of the country. But even those models are too simplistic and we can do better.

This also means that there should be no predetermined formula that determines of the amount of matching funds that are available for any project. Sparsely populated areas might require more than 50% federal matching to make the numbers work. I know it’s difficult to not be formulaic, but ideally each proposal for funding should be analyzed on its own and the appropriate funding award made according to the circumstance.

Be Open to Funding All Qualified Providers. The stimulus grants (particularly the ones awarded by the RUS) had a built in bias to give the money to existing RUS borrowers. For broadband that means basically small telcos and some electric coops. If we want to get broadband to the most rural places, then anybody willing to step to the plate with a good business plan and some experience needs to have an equal chance. This might mean ISPs, municipalities, cooperatives, cable companies or fiber overbuilders. There is angst among smaller carriers that any federal funding will go to the largest telcos and that smaller providers won’t get an opportunity to try for the money, as was done with CAF II.

Takes Time to have Shovel Ready Projects. At any given point in time there are not many shovel ready projects that are positioned to take funding immediately. My fear is that any federal program is going to come with a built-in clock ticking and will try to give out the money in a relatively short amount of time like was done with the stimulus grants. It can easily take a year to create a shovel ready project even for a community that is highly motivated. There are a lot of steps that must be undertaken before completing a grant application. And if there is a requirement that the matching funding must be in place in order to participate then that time frame can easily be a lot longer. So my hope is that any program gives the industry enough time to get ready. If the funds are going to be awarded within a year then it’s going to be a disaster and a lot of bad projects will get funded just because they were able to scratch together the funding request quickly. This can be successful if broadband money can be awarded over a two to four-year period rather than all at once. The longer the time frame, the better the proposed projects will be.

Don’t Break the System. There are a limited number of firms available to help put together business plans and to make engineering estimates. If a federal program tries to give out a lot of money too quickly there are not enough qualified engineers and financial consultants available to get the work done – and it’s not easy for these firms to staff up with people that have the necessary existing knowledge. We also saw shortages with fiber cable and electronics right after the stimulus plan. All segments of the industry are staffed and geared to an anticipated level of demand and it’s hard for the whole industry to pivot and react quickly to a massive new demand for services and components.

Make the Grant Forms Understandable. I have been doing telecom accounting since the 1970s and there were things on the stimulus grants forms that I didn’t understand. Bring in a panel of industry experts early to make sure that the forms used to ask for money are done in a way that the industry understands. A format that asks for financial input in the manner that the industry keeps their books will provide a lot more consistency between grants requests.

Tennessee Broadband Study

TennesseeThe State of Tennessee recently undertook the biggest investigation into broadband that I’ve seen from any state. More than 23,000 homes and businesses participated in the study process. What the study found was very familiar to those of us who work every day with broadband issues.

The genesis of the report was from a number of meetings held around the state by Randy Boyd, the new state Commissioner of Economic and Community Development. He reported that during his numerous ‘listening’ sessions around the state that the issue raised the most was about lack of access to broadband. This showed him that the state has a big broadband problem and led to this report.

The report asked what the definition of broadband ought to be in the state. The settled on the 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload used by the FCC. The study showed that 71% of homes with speeds at or above 25 Mbps said they had enough speed while only 48% of homes with 10 Mbps or less said they had enough speed. They discovered that upload speeds matter to businesses and that 3 Mbps seemed to be the minimum threshold for business-level service.  Possibly the most important finding in the study was a warning that the use of bandwidth continues to grow dramatically and that any definition of broadband will need to be continually increased in the future.

The study looked at actual broadband utilization in the state. They determined that 125,000 people in the state have no access to wireline broadband. The report also found that:

  • 69% of businesses and 76% of homes don’t have access to 25 Mbps broadband.
  • Competition means better speeds. For businesses, areas with only one facility-based ISP averaged 22.5 Mbps while areas with three ISPs averaged 43.8 Mbps.
  • 54% of households were connected with the slowest technologies – DSL, cellular wireless, satellite and dial-up.
  • They found that half of households that chose not to buy broadband cite the cost of broadband as their barrier to buying it.

The consultants hired by the state were asked to estimate how much it would cost to build broadband to all of those that didn’t have it. They estimated that it would cost $1.26 billion to build fiber to areas that today have broadband speeds less than 10/1 Mbps. They estimated it would cost $1.72 billion to build fiber to areas that don’t have 25/3 Mbps broadband.

They also looked at the cost of a fixed wireless network and those costs were $1 billion for places with less than 10/1 Mbps broadband and $1.36 billion for those without 25/3 broadband. Those estimates seem high to me. But they might include building a lot of backbone fiber to feed towers and also take into consideration the rugged terrain in much of the state.

The report is concluded by looking for solutions. The report recommended that the state has to get involved if it wants to help to bring broadband everywhere. And so it recommends the following as necessary for the state’s involvement:

  • Strong public leadership that champions broadband
  • Formation of a state broadband office or similar agency
  • Need to find ways to promote effective public-private partnerships
  • Public seed funding and grant programs to encourage investment in broadband
  • Transparency
  • Proper planning and due diligence

This study looked at broadband in Tennessee at a much more granular level than is done by various federal studies. Tennessee is a diverse state and is a mixture of big cities and rural back roads, much of it with rough terrain. But looking at 23,000 homes and businesses represents a big sample of the state and adds validity to the findings. Like a lot of Appalachia, Tennessee has more houses using older technologies for broadband than other parts of the country.

It will be interesting to see if the state acts on this report. Normally this kind of report is followed by a lot of lobbying by the big telcos and cable companies to discredit the results. The conclusions of the report are dead on. As much as governments might sit and hope that the commercial sector will somehow solve their broadband problems, we know in rural America that this will largely not happen. If a state wants to bring broadband to rural residents it must get involved – and the recommended solutions have proven to be effective in states like Minnesota.

State Contributions for Broadband

DEEDThe FCC has documented very well the lack of rural broadband. They gave out a tiny handful of ‘experimental’ broadband grants that were supposedly going to be the precursor to a large federal broadband grant program funded by the Universal Service Fund. But as usually happens with these things, politics took over and $9 billion was instead awarded through the CAF II program to the largest telcos to expand rural broadband to a paltry 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload.

And this is a shame because $9 billion could have been used as seed money in matching grants to build a whole lot of last mile broadband. This money could have seeded perhaps $40 billion to $50 billion of fiber in rural areas which would have meant that a lot of areas would get real broadband solutions. What’s probably the saddest is that the CAF II program lasts for six years, so that money is going to be tied up for a long time.

There doesn’t look to be any other move to provide federal funding for fiber, but there are some states that have been looking at the issue. But, as you might imagine, politics comes into play in these efforts as well. There aren’t a whole lot of state programs that are trying to fund fiber, but consider these two that are:

Minnesota crated the Border-to-Border Broadband Development Grant Program, created by the Legislature in 2014 and administered by the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). The grant provides dollar-for-dollar matching for constructing last mile fiber, although the money is likely to go to projects that contribute a higher percentage of the cost of a project. Minnesota is one of the lucky states that is running a budget surplus and this seemed like a good way to spend some of that money. There are numerous rural communities in the state that are actively seeking a broadband solution, so there is no lack of potential projects to be funded.

This was created in the 2014 legislature and the original bill asked to fund this with $100 million. The cable companies and carriers lobbied heavily against this funding, not wanting to have the state fund any competitors – although the funding was supposed to be used in areas where there is no broadband today. And the carriers were successful and chopped the grant pool down to $20 million.

When that money was awarded last year it went almost entirely to independent telephone companies and the only non-incumbent recipient of the grant was a new start-up cooperative. There were numerous applications from municipalities, but none were funded. The governor has recently recommended funding $200 million to this fund over the next two years, and we’ll have to wait and see how much of this makes it through the political gauntlet.

California has a program called the California Advanced Services Fund. Attempts to create funds within that program to build rural fiber have also been met with stiff opposition from the large incumbents.

Recently a bill was introduced to add $350 million to that fund, $150 million of which would go directly towards building last mile fiber in the form of matching grants. Past attempts to get infrastructure funding failed. The latest proposal has made it clear that any funding would only go to rural areas (in the last proposal it could have gone to urban areas). The new funding also has a significant pot of money allocated to broadband adoption efforts and for bringing broadband to public housing. Proponents of the bill are hoping that this will be more acceptable to the opponents, but if the past is any indicator the incumbents don’t want any competition of any kind.

It’s certainly laudable for the states to tackle broadband. There are obviously not going to be any federal programs aimed at the problem for now and anybody who understands broadband knows that help is needed in getting broadband to rural areas. But it seems that every attempt by states to tackle the problem gets killed or whittled down to the bare bones during the political process.