In one of his last acts as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai decided to maintain the FCC’s 6-year broadband standard of download speeds of 25 Mbps and uploads of 3 Mbps.
The decision was announced yesterday in the FCC’s annual broadband rollout report, released the day before Pai left the FCC. As in all previous years of Pai’s presidency, the report concludes that the telecommunications industry is doing enough to extend broadband access to all Americans – despite FCC Democrats saying the facts do not support that conclusion.
Pai’s report said:
We found that the current 25 / 3Mbps speed benchmark remains an appropriate measure for assessing whether a fixed service is providing advanced telecommunications capacity. We conclude that fixed services with speeds of 25 / 3Mbps continue to comply with the statutory definition of advanced telecommunications capacity; that is, such services “allow[] users create and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics and video telecommunications. “
Under US law, the FCC is required to determine annually whether “advanced telecommunications capabilities are being deployed for all Americans in a reasonable and timely manner” and to “take immediate action to accelerate deployment” and promote competition if the current deployment is not “reasonable and timely.” Maintaining the 25/3 Mbps standard for home Internet services, which has not changed since January 2015, makes it easier for Pai to give the telecommunications industry and the FCC a passing grade in the annual report. Pai’s annual reports also assessed the deployment of the mobile Internet at different speeds, but he did not adopt a single speed reference to determine whether a mobile service is “advanced”.
FCC Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, who could be the next chairman of the commission, has repeatedly argued that the FCC should adopt a higher speed benchmark for home Internet service. “With so many providers in our country implementing the gigabit service, it is time for the FCC to adjust its baseline upwards as well,” she said last year, calling for a download pattern of 100 Mbps and an upload pattern of over 3 Mbps .
“Currently, our standard is 3 megabits per second,” she said. “But this asymmetric approach is dated. We need to recognize that, with extraordinary changes in data processing and cloud storage, upload speeds must be rethought.”
Father: ISPs are doing enough, despite rural gaps
The report released yesterday concluded that “advanced telecommunications capacity is being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis” and that the “rural-urban divide is closing rapidly; the gap between the percentage of urban Americans and the percentage of rural Americans with access to 25 / 3Mbps fixed broadband dropped by almost half, dropping from 30 points at the end of 2016 to just 16 points at the end of 2019. “
In a press release, Pai emphasized his supposed role in expanding broadband access, saying, “Since my first day as president, the FCC’s top priority has been to end the digital divide.” In addition to the expansion of home Internet services, he pointed to FCC data that shows that “in late 2019, mobile operators offered 5G service to approximately 60 percent of Americans, a number that is substantially higher today.”
Pai also released today a list of what he considers his achievements as president of the FCC, including “Restoring Internet Freedom” – his phrase to deregulate the broadband industry and eliminate the net neutrality rules.
The laps of Pai’s victory are “inadequate”
FCC Democrats objected to Pai finalizing the broadband rollout report yesterday, instead of letting the task pass to the Biden administration.
“For the past two years, I have regretted the unwarranted victory errors that these reports seem to generate,” said FCC commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “Now – as tens of millions of Americans are unable to access school, work and health care online during the pandemic – patting themselves on the back is particularly inappropriate.”
Despite Pai’s optimistic conclusions – and the inaccuracy of FCC data, which tends to underestimate Americans without broadband access – the report has evidence to support Starks’ concerns about the continuing digital divide. At the end of 2019, only 4.4% of Americans lived in areas without access to the 25 / 3Mbps home Internet service, but data for rural and tribal areas shows a much uglier picture. With domestic Internet speeds of 25/3 Mbps, there is no coverage for 17.3% of rural areas and no coverage for 20.9% of tribal areas. Overall, there are about 65 million people in rural areas in the FCC data and about 4 million people in tribal areas.
Almost 99 percent of urban areas had access of 25/3 Mbps and 95 percent of urban areas had access even at speeds of 250/25 Mbps. But only 66.8 percent of rural areas and 63.7 percent of tribal areas had access to speeds of 100/10 Mbps, while 55.6 percent of rural areas and 49.6 percent of tribal areas had access to speeds of 100/10 Mbps:
These data are based on census blocks and count an entire census block as served, even if only one house in the census block can obtain the service. The Pai FCC has started the process of collecting geospatial data from ISPs to improve accuracy, but that task will be completed with whom President Biden chooses to serve as the FCC president.
The evidence that contradicts Father is “everything around us”
Rosenworcel said that Pai’s report obscures “the stark truth that the digital divide is very real and very big” and that it “confuses the logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says broadband is being rolled out to all Americans in a reasonable and timely manner. “
The evidence that contradicts Pai’s conclusions is “around us,” Rosenworcel continued:
There are people sitting in parking lots using free Wi-Fi signals because there is no other way to connect. There are students who fall into the homework gap for lack of the high-speed service they need to participate in distance learning. There are mayors in cities across the country calling for better broadband so that their communities have a fair chance of success in the digital age.
When Biden defeated Trump in the election, Congressional Democrats asked Pai to follow the previous practice of stopping “work on all party and controversial items” during the transition period. Pai never promised to do so – despite having taken the opposite stance four years earlier, when then President Tom Wheeler responded to an equivalent request from Republicans in Congress.
Starks argued that yesterday’s report was too controversial to pass when the FCC is about to change hands from Republicans to Democrats. Starks said:
I feel compelled to note that this Report should not even have been made public. After the election in November, Congressional leaders wrote to President Pai to demand that the Commission stop working on all party and controversial items during the presidential transition. This item is both.
However, President Pai refused to withdraw the Report, as Commissioner Rosenworcel and I asked. His justification – that the Report has no legal significance – is completely inconsistent with the Telecommunications Act, which instructs the Commission to take “immediate action” if it determines that advanced telecommunications capabilities are not being deployed for all Americans on a regular basis. reasonable and timely. This determination should have been left to the next administration, which could have addressed the issue before the statutory deadline.
“Speed and waste” in FCC grants
Pai has consistently claimed that his deregulation agenda has boosted broadband deployment, despite evidence to the contrary found in statements made by ISPs to investors and recent cuts in spending by major ISPs on networks. Pai also released data showing broadband progress, even after the FCC team warned it was based on incorrect ISP records.
Even Pai’s most direct efforts to end the digital divide have been controversial. Pai replaced the FCC’s Connect America Fund with a similar Rural Digital Opportunity Fund and recently provided $ 9.2 billion in financing that will be distributed over 10 years. But instead of waiting for more accurate broadband data to better target funding to areas that need it most, Pai went ahead with distributing the funding weeks before he left the FCC.
Grants must go to “high cost” areas where ISPs would not have a good business case for deployment without government funding. But the consumer advocacy group Free Press has been examining funding premiums in a series of reports, saying in one report that the Pai program is “subsidizing[ing] broadband for the rich. “
Part of the funding was for census blocks “located inside of Comcast’s service footprints “and other ISPs, places with little demand for broadband”, either because no one lives or even works there, or because most of them do not have residential properties and the few businesses may not need services advanced, “The Free Press wrote in another review yesterday. Pai’s broadband legacy is” hurry and waste, “the group said.
A bipartisan group of 157 members of Congress sent a letter yesterday urging Pai and other FCC commissioners to ensure that funds are not misused:
We urge the FCC to validate that each provider does in fact have the skills, capabilities and technical, financial, managerial and operational resources to provide the services they have promised to every American they plan to serve, regardless of the technology they use.
Americans “need an FCC to fight for them”
Proponents of stricter regulation of broadband providers are happy with Pai’s departure. In four years as president, Pai “adopted a radical agenda that reduced consumer protections, stamped corporate wish lists and even weakened authority. of your own agency, “senior adviser Joshua Stager of the New America Open Technology Institute said yesterday, referring to Pai’s decision to abandon FCC Title II regulatory authority over broadband providers. “We look forward to turning the page in this chapter of FCC history and urging new leadership to set a new course. The American people still need an FCC to fight for them.”