White House Continues Quest for Better Broadband Mousetrap

Today, the White House, NTIA and USDA all put out announcements on the newly signed Presidential Memorandum on the Broadband Opportunity Council, apparently a follow up to the President’s “adventure” in Cedar Falls, Iowa, earlier this year where he used the platform at a municipal entity to tout public-private partnerships in the broadband space. The initiative, this new Council, is designed to singularly focus on increasing broadband investment and adoption. Certainly a laudable goal, but it has that feeling of “here we go again on finding another mousetrap to build” instead of focusing on the tools that have already been in place and are already working. Rather than casting about for the “next big thing” or launching new unproven initiatives from whole cloth, we should be looking to build upon what has worked in the past to deploy and then sustain rural broadband. The best model for successful public-private partnerships–in fact, the only model that has had a widespread success to date–involved the efforts of small, local carriers committed to their communities leveraging a mix of public and private financing to build networks and then making efficient use of universal service support to ensure that services remain affordable and of high quality on those networks.
This effort will include a “new” Council co-chaired by the Secretaries of Commerce and Agriculture and will include 25 different government agencies and components that are designed to engage with stakeholders (Of course, we’ve already reached out to the White House, NTIA and USDA to ensure that we’re at the table!), identify barriers to deployment (How about removing those caps on the USF high cost program? Maybe addressing some issues on the table to alleviate some regulatory uncertainty?), and take the steps necessary to remove barriers to deployment and adoption. Sounds simple enough, right? (Coordinating among 25 governmental entities alone hurts my head to ponder.)
There are some specific recommendations like a common app for wireless broadband providers to lease space for their rooftop antennas, sharing best “dig once” policies from state and munis, and offering new online tools for finding and leasing federal assets available for broadband networks, again. Feels like we go down this rabbit hole every few months in the continuing quest to find the magic bullet for broadband deployment where it is most difficult to do or least attractive to serve. I’d love to see an announcement from the White House that on the heels of vastly increasing the USF E-Rate program, and as they begin their push to include broadband in the qualification for Lifeline, they would embrace the simple step of ensuring that USF be used to support broadband and data-only services in rural America, in addition to the current voice offering, and maybe even think about expanding the size of the high cost program, at least to meet inflationary adjustments, and then they might really have an epiphany on how to really accomplish their goal of more robust broadband deployment.
Sigh. Too logical.
On a positive note, the three USDA infrastructure projects announced today in conjunction with this initiative are all NTCA members with a proven track record who continue their hard work of deploying and sustaining rural broadband. It seems like the answer is right where it has been all along: available capital funding from RUS, ongoing support from the USF to ensure affordability, comparability and sustainability, and a commitment to consumers as demonstrated by the rural ILEC community.