These statements are not surprising coming from Commissioner O’Reilly. He voted two years ago against setting the current 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband and thought that number was too high. In a dissent to that ruling he said the 25/3 definition was unrealistically high and said, “While the statute directs us to look at “advanced” telecommunications capability, this stretches the concept to an untenable extreme. Some people, for example, believe, probably incorrectly, that we are on the path to interplanetary teleportation. Should we include the estimated bandwidth for that as well? “
I don’t understand why Commissioner O’Reilly is still taking this position today. Most of the big ISPs have climbed on board the big bandwidth wagon. Comcast and Cox and other cable companies are upgrading their cable networks to DOCSIS 3.1 in order to provide gigabit speeds. CenturyLink built fiber past almost a million homes last year. Altice says they are tearing out their coaxial networks and replacing them with fiber. AT&T claims to have plans to build fiber to pass 12 million homes and businesses. Numerous small overbuilders around the country are offering gigabit speeds.
You don’t have to go back too many years to a time when the big ISPs all agreed with O’Reilly. The big cable companies in particular repeatedly made it clear that people didn’t need any more bandwidth than what the cable companies were delivering. The cable companies fiercely resisted increasing data speeds for many years and many cable networks kept data speeds in the 6 Mbps download range even though their networks were capable of delivering higher speeds without the need for upgrades.
Part of the old reasoning for that position was that the ISPs were afraid that if they gave people faster speeds then they would then use those speeds and swamp the networks. But Google came along and upset the whole ISP world by offering an inexpensive gigabit product. The cable companies in cities like Kansas City and Austin had little choice and increased speeds across the board. And once they increased in those markets they had little choice but to improve speeds everywhere.
The cable companies found the same thing that all of my clients have found when increasing data speeds. Generally a unilateral increase in customer data speeds does not cause a big increase in data usage unless the customers were throttled and constrained before the increase. Most customers don’t use any more data when speeds get faster – they just enjoy the experience more.
Of course, customers want to download more data every year and the amount of total download doubles about every three years. But that phenomenon is separate from data speeds. All of the things we do on the web requires more bandwidth over time. You scroll through a Facebook page today and you encounter dozens of videos, for example. But having faster speeds available does not directly lead to increased data usage. Speed just gets the things done faster and more enjoyably.
Commissioner O’Reilly thinks it would be better if ISPs would somehow invest to bring mediocre data speeds to everybody in the country rather than investing in ultrafast speeds to urban areas. No doubt that would make the FCC’s life easier if rural people all had broadband. But it’s fairly obvious that big ISPs wouldn’t be investing in their urban networks unless those investments made them more money. And it’s just as obvious that the big ISPs have figured out that they can’t make the profits they want in rural America.
I’m not sure what constituency Commissioner O’Reilly is trying to please with these statements. Certainly any urban customers that are happily buying the ultrafast speeds he is referring to. Certainly the ISPs investing in faster data speeds think it’s a good business decision.
I think Commissioner O’Reilly and others at the FCC would like to see the rural broadband issue go away. They hope that the CAF II investments being made by the big telcos will make the rural areas happy and that the issue will evaporate. They want to be able to claim that they fixed the broadband problems in America by making sure that everybody gets at least a little bit of bandwidth.
But it’s not going to work that way. Certainly many rural customers who have had no broadband will be happy to finally get speeds of 10 – 15 Mbps from the CAF II program. Those kind of speeds will finally allow rural homes to take some part in the Internet. But then those folks will look around and see that they still don’t enjoy the same Internet access as folks in the urban areas. Instead of solving the rural broadband problem I think the CAF II program is just going to whet the rural appetite for faster broadband and then rural folks will begin yelling even louder for better broadband.