Today the Senate Commerce
Committee will hold a hearing on “The State of Broadband
Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic.” While ostensibly about the current state of
broadband, it will likely become a forum for the notion of “universal
broadband.” The reasoning behind universal broadband is fairly obvious:
Internet-based tools have become essential to coping with the pandemic. As
AAF’s Jennifer Huddleston noted, if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, the capacity
to work remotely, maintain social distance, and take classes from home would
have been far more technologically difficult —
if not impossible. It is easy to see that there will be a push for
everyone to have access to these innovations.
But it will be easier said than done. One thing Congress can do is throw money
at the problem. But taxpayer money usually comes with a complex set of
requirements and regulations. As I recently argued in USA Today, the vitality of
internet-based innovation is a tribute to minimizing exactly those same
regulatory straightjackets.
A second thing is that limited broadband access may not be about
money. As previous AAF research shows, the cost of broadband
service has been less of a factor than a desire to have it at all. Now, with
the advent of the pandemic and the widespread need to work and take classes
from home, this preference may change. But there is no evidence yet
that shows massive subsidies will get people to adopt broadband.
Third, a key part of “universal” is getting more adoption in “rural” areas. But
rural is a tricky concept. As AAF research notes, “By definition, rural America is
simply everything that isn’t located within a metro region, but that doesn’t
mean rural America isn’t clustered into population centers. One commonly used
classification scheme is the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes developed by the
United States Department of Agriculture, which provides researchers with
detailed residential classifications to analyze the degree of rurality and
metro proximity.” Further, “There is a strong spatial component to broadband
deployment, which AAF’s previous research confirms. Micropolitan cores, which
are rural population cores with between 10,000 and 50,000 people, already
have broad access to broadband similar to metropolitan cores. But the
surrounding areas tend to show marked differences in broadband availability.
Access drops quickly the further you get from a population center. In
other words, many rural towns tend to have good internet access already, and it
is in those population centers where the jobs are located.”
Finally, there is nothing about previous efforts that gives reason
for optimism. The Department of Agriculture’s Broadband Loan Program found no
impact for rural areas, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s
$7 billion broadband investment had at best mixed success.
Today’s conversation will be enlightening, but setting the bar at “universal”
may be a bit too optimistic.
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