There are still those in Congress that don’t want the Affordable Care Plan (ACP) to end. Both the House and the Senate made recent moves to advance the resurrection of ACP. As a reminder, the ACP plan provides a $30 subsidy for broadband for low-income households, with some homes eligible for a $75 discount.
In the House, the team of Rep. Nikki Budzinski (R-IL) and Rep. Mike Carey (R-OH) introduced the Secure and Affordable Broadband Extension Act. The bill was quickly co-sponsored by a bipartisan list of representatives including Angie Craig (D-MN), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Joe Courtney (D-CT), Jen Kiggans (R-VA), Susan Wild (D-PA), Jack Bergman (R-MI), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), James Moylan (R-GU), Annie Kuster (D-NH) and Jenniffer González-Colón (R-PR).
The Act also includes funds for the completion of the rip-and-replace of Chinese wireless electronics from Huawei and ZTE. The bill would be funded by an FCC auction of the AWS-3 band of spectrum. This includes three bands of spectrum from 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1789 MHz, and 2144-2180 MHz – spectrum that is desirable for cellular broadband. The Act also recommends lowering the size of the ACP by decreasing eligibility from 200% of the poverty level to 135% – the level that has been used for years by the FCC’s Lifeline Fund.
The Senate also has a current ACP replacement bill – the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act. The original Act was co-sponsored by a bipartisan group including Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), JD Vance (R-OH), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Roger Marshall (R-KS). This bill recently made it past the first hurdle and was advanced by the Commerce Committee, including an amendment to provide $7 billion in funding. The Senate bill also also now includes $3 billion to complete the rep-and-replace.
The laws are just at the beginning of the legislative process. They would have to be passed by the House and Senate floor, reconciled to have matching provisions, and get signed by the President.
A long list of ISPs have expressed support for these bills. But I have to wonder how a renewed ACP plan will be received in practice. If ACP starts over, ISPs will have to go through the process of recertifying every customer and can’t just restart for former ACP customers. It’s also likely that some customers were unable to pay their first bill after the end of ACP and would now be considered as bad debt customers and possibly ineligible by many ISPs to participate.
The whole idea of funding ACP one year at a time brings other baggage. It seems like that many ISPs are going to be less than enthusiastic about signing customers when there is a good likelihood in a year that the fund will run dry again and the process will repeat. ISPs are not reimbursed for the big effort of recertifying customers or of processing the monthly payments to the FCC. I have to think that many ISPs will voice support, but won’t not try very hard during a reconstituted ACP.
The ACP plan holds great promise if it is permanently funded. If ISPs can count on the subsidy, there are numerous ways to use ACP as part of the solution for solving the lack of broadband in low-income urban neighborhoods. But after this last fiasco with the funding going dry, there is no bank or other lending source that will count ACP revenues as a reliable source of income for an ISP – and they shouldn’t. Anybody who builds a business plan reliant on ACP will likely struggle or fail whenever the funding abruptly stops.
If passed, these bills give ACP life for another year or so. But the bills fall far short of fixing ACP.