FCC Broadband Report: What Broadband Competition Problem?

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

By law, the FCC is required once a year to issue a report indicating whether quality broadband is being deployed on a "reasonable and timely basis." If not, the agency is supposed to, you know, actually do something about it. Unsurprisingly, the Pai FCC last year issued a glowing report declaring that everything was going swimmingly, despite some glaring evidence to the contrary. After all, the nation's phone companies have effectively stopped upgrading their DSL lines, leaving cable giants like Comcast with a quietly growing monopoly over faster broadband speeds (no, 5G won't magically fix this).

This week, the FCC once again issued a report stating that broadband was being deployed in a reasonable and timely basis. As with the earlier, leaked versions of this report, the FCC has been quick to proclaim that some modest improvement in overall broadband availability was thanks to Pai FCC policies like killing net neutrality:

"According to the FCC’s latest study, the number of Americans lacking access to a broadband (defined by the FCC as 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream) has dropped from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 21.3 million Americans at the end of 2017. The FCC said availability of 250 Mbps connections grew 36 percent in 2017.

“This report shows that our approach is working,” Pai said of the report before it was formally released to the public. “But we won’t rest until all Americans can have access to broadband and the 21st century opportunities it provides to communities everywhere."

But there are several problems with this claim. One, this growth is well in line with past years. Two, much of the growth in the report is thanks to things Pai had nothing to do with. For example, while Pai's FCC takes credit for "record" fiber growth last year, at least half of the lines deployed were thanks to conditions affixed by the previous FCC to AT&T's 2015 merger with DirecTV. Similarly, a not insubstantial portion of the broadband speed and availability improvements are courtesy of community broadband networks Pai's FCC actively opposes. And while Pai has also tried to claim some of the growth is thanks to killing net neutrality, the report's data is only current up to the end of 2017. Net neutrality wasn't officially repealed until June of 2018.

This is all before you get to the fact that none of this data is reliable because US broadband mapping and availability data is hot garbage, something all five Commissioners (after years of complaints) have finally started to acknowledge:

"“We need to stop relying on data we know is wrong,” Rosenworcel said. “Putting aside the embarrassing fumble of the FCC blindly accepting incorrect data for the original version of this report, there are serious problems with its basic methodology. Time and again this agency has acknowledged the grave limitations of the data we collect to assess broadband deployment.”

Gigi Sohn, a lawyer for the previous FCC, told Motherboard in a statement that you can’t fix a problem you don’t really understand.

“The FCC's 2019 Broadband Deployment Report is hopelessly flawed and cannot be the basis for future policymaking,” Sohn said. “Nor does it validate Chairman Pai’s unsubstantiated claims that his policies have helped to close the digital divide."

You'll also note that this report, much like the FCC's $250 million broadband map, fails utterly to even mention the high cost of broadband in the United States. While the FCC obtains pricing data from ISPs, it has long shirked away from sharing this data with the public, lest somebody get a better sense of the hugely negative impact limited competition has on the US market.

Another notable bit of amusement: an earlier draft of Pai's report was found to have been based on an ISP clerical error that resulted in the FCC overstating broadband availability by some 62 million households. When Pai released the initial synopsis of the report, he proclaimed that the near-mystical growth was a direct reflection of his policies. After consumer groups pointed out the errors in the data the FCC quietly fixed the error, but left its conclusions the same. The FCC's newest Commissioner, Geoffrey Starks, found that a little bit odd:

"The fact that a 2019 Broadband Deployment Report with an error of over 62 million connections was circulated to the full Commission raises serious questions. Was the Chairman’s office aware of the errors when it circulated the draft report? If not, why didn’t an “outlier” detection function raise alarms with regard to Barrier Free? Also, once the report was corrected, the fact that such a large number of connections came out of the report’s underlying data without changing the report’s conclusion, and without resulting in a substantial charge to the report, calls into question the extent to which the report and its conclusions depend on and flow from data."

Again, none of this is really new. While the FCC has always had a tenuous relationship with factual data under both parties, Pai's FCC has taken this to an entirely new level. It's clear to pretty much everybody that US broadband is an incredibly broken market dominated by some of the least-liked natural monopolies in America. But Pai has yet to stand up to telecom giants on a single issue of substance, and his FCC has been caught repeatedly just blindly using massaged telecom lobbyist data to justify policies that have been widely criticized, on a bipartisan basis, for making existing problems (particularly high prices) worse.

Filed Under: ajit pai, competition, fcc, net neutrality

Ajit Pai May Have Lied To Congress About FCC's Failure To Address Wireless Location Data Scandals

from the ill-communication dept

So we've talked a bit about how the FCC has done absolutely nothing to seriously address the rise of wireless industry location data scandals. That's despite story after story showing how wireless carriers were selling this data to an endless line of companies and organizations. Those organizations, in turn, failed utterly to protect this data from being misused by everybody from law enforcement to bail bondsman and even random stalkers posing as law enforcement. Despite this being on scale with the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, the silence from the Pai FCC has been deafening.

Last week during a Congressional FCC oversight hearing, several lawmakers criticized Pai for failing to hold carriers accountable or even publicly mentioning the scandal. And while the FCC has supposedly been conducting an investigation for the better part of the last year, Pai's fellow commissioners say they've been stonewalled when they've asked about the progress of the inquiry. When Representative Anna Eshoo pressed Pai on whether he was withholding information from his fellow commissioners, he refused to answer the question:

"Can you tell us today that you’re going to share information with two full-fledged members of the commission?” Eshoo asked at one point. “You’re saying you can’t tell us, but will you tell them?”

“Congresswoman, this is not a ‘yes or no’ question,” he said.

Cute. Again, both of Pai's fellow Democratic Commissioners (Geoffrey Sparks and Jessica Rosenworcel) say they requested the “letters of inquiry” sent out by the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau at the investigation’s outset but were repeatedly stonewalled by Pai and his leadership team. But when pressed by Congress, Pai stated he was "not aware" of any such requests, suggesting the FCC boss lied to Congress:

"Sources with knowledge of the requests told Gizmodo that they were baffled by the chairman’s response, for one reason in particular: At an FCC Open Commission Meeting on January 30, Rosenworcel told a group of reporters while live-streaming on the agency’s website: “I’ve been told there’s an investigation, but I’ve asked the enforcement bureau for the letters of inquiry that start investigations, and they have not yet been provided to me. I’d like to see them."

Given Pai's refusal to hold giant telecom carriers accountable for pretty much anything (ranging from telco taxpayer fraud to hurricane recovery failures), most of the consumer activists and lawyers I've spoken to believe Pai is just running interference for industry until the statute of limitations runs out, and the reason he doesn't want to talk much about the FCC's investigation is because it's not much of one. Some consumer groups were particularly gobsmacked by Pai's attempt to throw Commissioner Starks (who just started work) under the bus for the agency's failures on this front:

Again, Pai's decision to be a rubber stamp for the telecom industry's biggest companies isn't much in dispute at this point, though Pai and his staffers like to insist (and may even actually believe) this is all just unfair partisan posturing. Pai has repeatedly stated that the industry can self-regulate, but when it comes to privacy they've shown themselves to be incapable of the task. So while carriers say they've ceased the collection and sale of your location data to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the internet, with their history of falsehoods on the privacy front, the only way to actually confirm this is a transparent, third party inquiry.

Filed Under: ajit pai, congress, fcc, lying to congress

Pai FCC 'Solution' To Nation's Great Robocall Apocalypse? More Meetings

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

Despite endless government initiatives and countless promises from the telecom sector, our national robocall hell continues. Robocalls from telemarketers continue to be the subject the FCC receives the most complaints about (200,000 complaints annually, making up 60% of all FCC complaints), and recent data from the Robocall Index indicates that the problem is only getting worse. Consumers continue to be hammered by mortgage interest rate scams, credit card scams, student loan scams, business loan scams, and IRS scams. 4.9 billion such calls were placed in April alone.

There's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to fixing the problem. The FCC, now little more than a rubber stamp for industry under Ajit Pai, has been lax in holding carrier feet to the fire. Carriers in turn have blamed everyone but themselves for their own lax response. Similarly, many carriers have been slow to offer customers free robocall blocking tech, and even slower in adopting call authentication technology (like SHAKEN/STIR), which would go a long way toward hampering the call spoofing at the heart of the problem. This John Oliver segment is worth a watch:

Enter FCC boss Ajit Pai, who has been increasingly under fire for not doing more to expedite solutions to our great, national robocall apocalypse. This week Pai proclaimed that he has "demanded" that carriers finally adopt call authentication technology this year, something that isn't much of a "demand" since most carriers have said they'd already planned to deploy the technology this year. His other solution popping up this week is being framed by media outlets fairly inaccurately as well. For example. Pai is allowed to insist via Reuters that carriers haven't deployed automatic call blocking technology because they didn't think the FCC would allow it:

"Pai said many service providers have held off developing and deploying default call-blocking tools because of uncertainty about whether the tools are legal under the FCC rules.

Allowing the default call-blocking could significantly increase development and consumer adoption of the tools, Pai said.

“By making it clear that such call blocking is allowed, the FCC will give voice service providers the legal certainty they need to block unwanted calls from the outset so that consumers never have to get them,” Pai said.

Pai's effectively trying to shift the focus away from a decade's worth of carrier failures and toward the idea that some legal confusion is the exclusive reason the industry has failed to police robocalls. But a few years ago, AT&T found itself under fire after Consumer Reports gathered a petition of 600,000 signatures demanding it do more to thwart robocalls. The company's response? To falsely blame the FCC, claiming the agency was prohibiting it from doing so. The former Wheeler FCC made it very clear in numerous letters that such tools were allowed under FCC rules.

To be clear, even clearer rules expressly permitting that carriers be allowed to implement robocall blocking tech that operates by default is all well and good. But Pai's announcement is framed in such a way to suggest that regulatory murk--not a decade of carrier apathy--is exclusively to blame for our collective robocall failures.

Pai's other primary solution for the robocall menace appears to be a new summit in July to discuss ongoing progress:

Of course in the US telecom market, a lack of competition and meaningful regulatory oversight means there's really very little penalty for lazy behavior, so "market based solutions" to problems like this are often slow to materialize if they materialize at all. Robocalls are a notable problem for Pai given they're the agency's top complaint, but actually doing something about it might need to involve actual market oversight and punishment, concepts that clash with Pai's dogmatic belief that the telecom sector can self regulate. Either way Pai's fellow Commissioners weren't particularly impressed, noting that the FCC needs fewer meetings and more concrete action:

And while Pai continues to promise he'll take "regulatory action" against carriers that drag their feet, there's some understandable skepticism on that front. After all, this is the same FCC head that just got done effectively neutering his own agency at telecom lobbyist request and routinely parrots telecom lobbyist data points with absolutely no skepticism. The sheer volume of consumer anger on this subject could push Pai out of his comfort zone, but given Pai's recent history as the poster child for regulatory capture, his willingness to actually stand up to industry giants is something that will need to be seen to be believed.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, jessica rosenworcel, robocalls, shaken/stir

The Pai FCC Sits On Its Hands While Phone Companies Rip Off American Taxpayers

from the ill-communication dept

We've talked often about how the nation's phone companies, now fixated on video and online advertising, have effectively just been letting their DSL and phone networks fall apart while still charging exorbitant rates. Not only did these companies take billions in taxpayer dollars to build these older copper-based networks, they took billions more in subsidies for fiber upgrades they never fully deployed. Yet increasingly we've watched as they've refused to upgrade or even repair their networks across countless states, leaving customers trapped with expensive service that often doesn't even meet the FCC's standard definition of broadband (25 Mbps).

This problem has often been exemplified by Frontier Communications in West Virginia, where local Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has quietly done an amazing job the last few years chronicling the state's immense corruption and dysfunction, from the state's use of broadband stimulus subsidies on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant consultants, to state leaders' attempts to bury reports supporting allegations that Frontier engaged in systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime.

Though not quite as profound, similar problems have plagued Frontier's operations in the state of Minnesota. The Minnesota Attorney General's office has been investigating whether Frontier violated state consumer-protection laws for a while now, and not long ago issued a 133 page report (pdf) detailing how terrible the company is at maintaining and repairing its network despite endless taxpayer subsidies. The report clearly illustrated a pattern of the company letting outages go on for months at a time, often putting paying customers at risk:

"The findings of this investigation detail an extraordinary situation, where customers have suffered with outages of months, or more, when the law requires telephone utilities to make all reasonable efforts to prevent interruptions of service. When interruptions occur, telephone utilities are to restore service “with the shortest possible delay.” Frontier customers with these outages include those with family members with urgent medical needs, such as pacemakers monitored by their medical teams via the customer’s landline."

Given that Frontier receives $283.4 million each year from the FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF), there's some obvious questions here as to who is minding the store and ensuring that Frontier is adhering to the law.

Like most broadband dysfunction, giant broadband ISPs get away with this sort of thing thanks to two things: a lack of real broadband competition, and regulatory capture. Case in point: Ajit Pai, whose FCC is supposed at least occasionally protect the American public. Senators in Minnesota have recently been pressing him to take some kind of action, even to publicly condemn the kind of grift and consumer mistreatment that's pretty common in the the state. In a letter posted to the FCC website (pdf), Pai effectively acknowledged the problem, though falls well short of saying he'll actually do anything about it:

"...the FCC will remain vigilant to ensure that our rules are observed and taxpayer funds respected. Accordingly, I have conveyed the information from your letter regarding the state commission’s investigation to our staff and have asked them carefully to monitor this development. Thank you for bringing this aspect of the issue to my attention."

While Pai is just a particularly obvious example of the regulatory capture that has infected telecom, this kind of "maybe we'll look into it" attitude has plagued both parties for decades when it comes to big telecom's long history of taxpayer-supported shenanigans and overall apathy. Needless to say, local state Senators weren't particularly enthusiastic about Pai's promise, especially given Pai's often breathless claims that he's a champion of stopping fraud and waste:

"For a chairman who is so concerned with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, it's baffling that the commission tasked with overseeing billions of dollars in public money is declining to investigate the more than a thousand allegations of poor service by a company that receives that public money to provide those services," US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told Ars in a statement today."

Given this is America, this will likely just be dismissed as partisan bickering. But it shouldn't be. We've thrown endless billions in taxpayer dollars at giant telecom conglomerates with often just a fleeting effort to ensure that money is being spent wisely. And while it's nice the Pai FCC will "monitor" the problem, we're long past that point. If you dig for more than twenty seconds, you can find endless examples of giant ISPs taking taxpayer dollars in exchange for the technological equivalent of damp garbage. And were Pai a quarter of the stalwart defender of fraud and waste he professes to be, this stuff would be met with a lot more than just "we might look into it."

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, fiber, oversight, subsidies, taxpayers, upgrades
Companies: frontier communications

The Super 'Transparent' Pai FCC Is Still Trying To Hide Details On Those Fake Net Neutrality Comments

from the dysfunction-junction dept

We've long discussed how the Pai FCC's net neutrality repeal was plagued with millions of fraudulent comments, many of which were submitted by a bot pulling names from a hacked database of some kind. Millions of ordinary folks (like myself) had their identities used to support Pai's unpopular plan, as did several Senators. Numerous journalists have submitted FOIA requests for more data (server logs, IP addresses, API data, anything) that might indicate who was behind the fraudulent comments, who may have bankrolled them, and what the Pai FCC knew about it.

But the Pai FCC has repeatedly tried to tap dance around FOIA requests, leading to several journalists (including those at the New York Times and Buzzfeed) suing the FCC. Despite the Times' lawyers best efforts to work with the FCC to tailor the nature of their requests over a period of months, the agency continues to hide behind FOIA exemptions that don't really apply here: namely FOIA exemption 6 (related to protecting privacy) and 7E (related to protecting agency security and law enforcement activity).

In court filings made last week, the FCC also reiterated its claim that the primary reason it won't release more data is because it's just super concerned about user privacy:

"If the FCC is compelled to disclose an individual’s IP address, operating system and version, browser platform and version, and language settings, and that information is linked to the individual’s publicly-available name and postal address, that disclosure would result in clearly unwarranted invasions of personal privacy,” the FCC argues in papers filed late last week with U.S. District Court Judge Lorna Schofield in the Southern District of New York."

To be clear, this is the same FCC that did absolutely nothing to prevent or address the fraud, then actively blocked law enforcement inquiries into this issue. In other words, this FCC has had numerous opportunities to cooperate with both law enforcement by providing confidential data, and has refused to do so. It's also the same FCC that has done absolutely nothing about countless privacy scandals in the telecom sector, suggesting this sudden breathless concern for privacy may not be particularly authentic.

NY Times lawyers have responded by claiming they're entitled to the data under the freedom of information act, and it's essential to discovering where the bogus comments originated. They've also argued that information like IP address isn't all that sacred, since most of the commenters have likely utilized countless different IP addresses in the several years since:

"Most individuals connect their devices to the internet using a steadily changing series of IP addresses assigned by internet service providers,” the Times wrote in a motion for summary judgment. “An internet-connected device’s IP address today may not be its IP address tomorrow. And the IP address of a device used by a commenter in mid-2017 is almost certainly not its IP address in mid-2019."

Using the data they've collected so far, diligent reporters have already found many of the fake comments were driven by CQ Roll Call, a DC-based news and policy organization, and Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF), a "dark money" influence group with historical ties to defending tobacco companies. Who their clients were in this instance should be fairly obvious, but nobody has been able to publicly, directly link the effort to the telecom sector just yet. Given several ongoing lawsuits and investigations by numerous state AGs, the GAO, and FBI, it still seems fairly likely that there's several chapters in this ridiculous novel yet to come.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fake comments, fcc, net neutrality, privacy, transparency

The FCC Hasn't Done A Damn Thing To Seriously Police Wireless Location Data Scandals

from the ill-communication dept

While Facebook (usually justly) gets the lion's share of privacy criticism, wireless carriers haven't been too far behind. In the last few years we've learned that they're frequently hoovering up your daily location data and then selling it to a long chain of often dubious companies. More recently they've been busted even selling access to E-911 location data, which is increasingly even more accurate in tracking users than traditional GPS. We've noted repeatedly that lax ethical standards result in this data often being abused by dubious third parties, or used illegally by law enforcement or those pretending to be law enforcement.

Throughout these evolving scandals, the Pai FCC hasn't done much of anything to ensure the public this is being adequately looked into. There's been no critical statement about this practice issued by the FCC, and no meaningful investigation launched (at least publicly). And while wireless carriers have insisted they've stopped collecting and selling this data (which they've been doing for the better part of the last decade without anybody in either party much caring), their promises historically haven't been worth all that much when it comes to the subject of privacy.

To truly address the location data scandal(s), carriers need to voluntarily or by force make it transparently clear they've stopped collecting and selling this data (which in several instances like E-911 data is against the law). Hoping to add a little fuel to the fire, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel this week ramped up her criticisms of the practice and the FCC's apathy:

As part of that push, Rosenworcel sent new letters to each of the big four wireless carriers demanding more evidence supporting their claims that they've stopped this behavior, and asking what happens to the data that's already been collected (which is, curiously I think, the first time I've even seen this question asked). The problem of course that given the Pai FCC majority is effectively a rubber stamp for industry at this juncture, it's going to be hard to get a majority vote forcing these companies to be transparent and confirm they've stopped engaging in this behavior. Carriers like Verizon, for what it's worth, insist they've learned the error of their ways:

"Verizon has led the industry in working to end agreements with location aggregators. We were first to take action when these issues surfaced last Summer. We followed through with our pledge and have fully terminated our location aggregator arrangements. We're happy to talk about what we've done in this area with the Commissioner."

Which again, might mean something if this was an industry that had any credibility on this subject. But Verizon in particular has a long history of collecting and monetizing user data without being transparent about it. And trying to downplay the scope of the problems with its behavior. And of course working tirelessly to scuttle every attempt at new privacy guidelines, no matter how modest. You know, like the fairly basic FCC privacy rules Verizon convinced Congress to quickly scuttle in 2017 that would have gone a long way in preventing these exact location data scandals in the first place.

And on the rare occasion the company is actually punished, the fines are often a tiny, tiny fraction of the money gleaned by whatever shady behavior they were engaged in, which does nothing to deter future bad actions (in fact it in some ways encourages it). And with Pai having just effectively neutered a lot of the FCC's authority over ISPs at their lobbyists' behest, it's going to be harder than ever to force a serious reckoning on this subject should carriers prove uncooperative and non-transparent.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, location data, privacy

FCC Under Fire For Putting ALEC Rep On 'Consumer' Advisory Board

from the foxes-and-the-hen-house dept

In 2017, FCC head Ajit Pai came under fire for filling a new "Broadband Deployment Advisory Council" (BDAC) task force with oodles of industry representatives, but few if any consumer representatives or local town or city officials. Not too surprisingly the panel saw a significant amount of controversy, several protest resignations, and the arrest of a one-time panel chair for fraud, but the panel itself never actually accomplished much of anything to address the problem it was created for.

Fast forward to last week, and the FCC has once again found itself under fire for appointing a member of the The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to the agency's "consumer advisory" panel:

"A committee that advises the Federal Communications Commission on consumer-related matters now includes a representative of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies against municipal broadband, net neutrality, and other consumer protection measures. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced his Consumer Advisory Committee's new makeup on Wednesday. One new member is Jonathon Hauenschild, director of ALEC's Task Force on Communications and Technology. He and other Consumer Advisory Committee will serve two-year terms.

The most obvious problem is that ALEC is directly employed by the telecom sector to undermine and eliminate consumer protections.

ALEC played a starring role in helping the broadband industry pass blatantly-protectionist bills in more than 21 states that hamstrung or simply banned towns or cities from building their own networks, even in instances when private industry refuses to. It has also bandied about cease and desist warnings against critics who've pointed this out. Both ALEC and Hauenschild have lobbied against net neutrality protections that continue to have the overwhelming bipartisan support of the public. You'd be hard pressed to find a single actual consumer advocate who'd agree with ALEC's positions on these issues.

While Hauenschild likely holds some personally divergent opinions from his employer, there's very little in his background or time at ALEC that would qualify him as expert on consumer telecom issues. Certainly nothing that would somehow position him above a universe of objective experts or academics who've actually worked to protect consumer welfare. And while Pai appointing a like-minded ally to an FCC panel isn't surprising, involving ALEC also raised a few eyebrows given that even AT&T and Verizon have recently backed away from the organization due to its recent hosting of a bigoted, far-right extremist:

"ALEC has long received financial support from the telecom industry. But Verizon left ALEC in September 2018 after it hosted a speech by right-wing activist David Horowitz, in which Horowitz argued against the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, compared the left wing's support of "redistribution of income" to slavery, and said that "at the K-12 level, school curricula have been turned over to racist organizations like Black Lives Matter, and terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood."

Verizon explained to The Intercept that it "has no tolerance for racist, white supremacist, or sexist comment[s] or ideals." AT&T subsequently ended its membership in ALEC, also citing the Horowitz speech."

While ALEC certainly has expertise in consumer protection, it comes in the form of trying to prevent it from happening. Again, Pai surrounding himself with like-minded allies isn't surprising. But appointing an ALEC rep to a consumer issue advisory panel is kind of like inviting a hungry shark to your swimming safety seminar: there's certainly experience there, just not of a variety you're going to find useful. And certainly not helpful when it comes to fixing the universe of problems consumers face in a telecom sector dominated by wealthy and well-connected natural monopolies.

Filed Under: ajit pai, consumer advisory board, fcc
Companies: alec

Very Little In Trump's 'Bold' New Rural Broadband Plan Is Actually New

from the head-fake dept

Last week the Trump administration and the Ajit Pai FCC held a major press conference announcing a "bold" new three-pronged program they claimed would address the nation's longstanding rural broadband issues. During the conference, the President and Pai were flanked by a chorus line of cellular industry employees and ranchers adorned in both tower climbing gear and cowboy hats, apparently in a bid to add a little authenticity to the Village People-esque proceedings:

In his speech, Trump offered his insights on how the "race to 5G" (fifth generation wireless) was an administration priority and a cornerstone of the purportedly new plan:

"We were at 4G, and everybody was saying, “We have to get 4G.” And then they said, before that, “We have to get 3G.” And now we have to get 5G, and 5G is a big deal. And that’s going to be there for a while. And I guess, at some point, we’ll be talking to you about number 6. What do you think? (Laughter.) Do you think that’s true, Ajit?"

According to the administration, part one of the plan involves a new spectrum auction to help drive the deployment of 5G to rural areas. Part two involves clearing away a lot of the "regulatory underbrush" (read: net neutrality, privacy protections, FCC authority over ISPs) the industry has falsely claimed stifled its ability to adequately deploy broadband. And part three is the creation of a "new" $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund it promised would help connect up to four million rural homes and small businesses to high-speed broadband networks over the next decade.

On the surface that all sounds lovely, and the larger technology press was quick to parrot the claims without much skepticism:

"The two proposals reflect the most intensive effort of the Trump era to close the so-called “digital divide” and gain an edge in the global race to build a fully functioning, nationwide 5G network. Proponents say the advances that 5G offers over 4G LTE will enable mobile download speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second — roughly 100 times faster than the standard — and pave the way for new technologies such as self-driving cars and virtual reality."

You may, however, be shocked to learn the government's real plan is a far cry from what it was portrayed as.

For one, telecom policy experts told me the "new" $20 billion fund isn't actually new. It appears that the FCC is just renaming an existing fund (the Connect America Fund, slated to expire in 2021) and making a few tweaks to it. Of course the FCC hasn't actually announced the specifics behind the changes, though given its fealty to the likes of AT&T and Verizon, you can probably be fairly certain that it involves ensuring that the biggest telecom companies wind up getting a larger chunk of subsidies to help fund their fiber backhaul and 5G deployments.

Granted throwing more money at AT&T and Verizon never really actually fixes much of anything, as the countless billions taxpayers have doled out for half-completed fiber connections pretty routinely shows. These are the same companies that just received billions in Trump tax breaks and countless regulatory favors. They don't need more taxpayer money, but having watched this industry for years I'd wager these two companies' lawyers are the ones driving whatever changes to the program Pai has in store.

Two, the spectrum auctions that Trump and Pai heralded as helping rural America not only weren't new (they'd been planned since the previous FCC), the spectrum being auctioned doesn't actually help rural America in the slightest. Wall Street telecom analyst Craig Moffett noted last week how the millimeter spectrum being auctioned has numerous line-of-sight, range, and wall penetration issues, and will only likely be used in urban markets:

"Aside from unresolved phone battery issues, Moffett told Motherboard that 5G requires “incredibly wide” blocks of spectrum ideally up to 800 MHz wide. The only place blocks of that size reside is in the upper reaches of millimeter wave spectrum. But that spectrum comes with its own issues, Moffett said—namely difficulties with long range signal penetration of building walls, something journalists quickly discovered when testing Verizon’s Chicago 5G launch.

As a result, the technology will be useful for many urban environments, but only via the use of numerous “small cells,” frequently placed on city light poles or building roofs. In more rural and suburban markets carriers will rely on “sub-6” (below 6 GHz) spectrum for cost reasons, providing connectivity that’s going to be a far cry from the speeds promised by carrier marketing.

“Yes, it will be better than 4G eventually, and it will be great for supporting huge numbers of low bandwidth IoT connections,” Moffett said. “But broad-based availability of the kinds of insane speeds people have gotten so excited reading about won’t be available for many, many years, if at all.”

In short, the major "new" funding wasn't new, and the major "new" spectrum auction not only wasn't new, it had nothing to do at all with rural users. Granted Pai also tried to hand off policy moves like killing net neutrality and neutering FCC authority over ISPs as solving the industry's problems, when that's not really true either. Giving entrenched natural monopolies a free pass to behave anti-competitively and jack up captive customer bills doesn't aid rural broadband users, it just doubles down on all the problems that brought us to this point in the first place.

The wireless industry has tried hard to obscure a basic fact: that the same coverage and high prices that plague 4G will plague 5G.

There's still little real incentive to cover rural America because the return on investment isn't there. Subsidies don't work because state and federal lawmakers have become corrupted. And there's still regional geographical monopolies over things like cell tower backhaul that will keep prices high. Meanwhile, as our obsession with merger mania escalates (Sprint, T-Mobile), the incentive to genuinely compete on price drops proportionally. Add in some regulatory capture and the Pai FCC's assault on consumer protections, and it shouldn't take a genius to see that American consumers, especially rural ones, aren't a top priority.

Last week's press conference appears to be entirely focused on trying to trick rural voters into thinking the Pai FCC has their best interests at heart. There's little real evidence to suggest that's actually true, though the majority of the press was happy to dutifully carry forth the claim to those voters all the same.

Filed Under: 5g, ajit pai, donald trump, fcc, rural broadband, spectrum

Pai FCC Tours The Country Promising Better Rural Broadband, But His Policies Routinely Undermine That Goal

from the watch-what-I-do,-not-what-I-say dept

You may have noticed that FCC boss Ajit Pai likes to breathlessly and repeatedly proclaim that one of his top priorities while chair of the FCC is to "close the digital divide." Pai, who clearly harbors post-FCC political aspirations, can usually be found touring the nation's least-connected states declaring that he's working tirelessly to shore up broadband connectivity and competition nationwide. On trip after taxpayer funded trip, both Pai and his fellow commissioners tell audiences his policies are expanding high-speed internet access and closing the digital divide to create jobs and increase digital opportunity.

Several times a month, some small local paper can be found unquestioningly hyping Pai and his fellow commissioners' "digital opportunity tour." Like this recent piece on FCC Commissioner Branden Carr's trip to Alaska, or this piece on Pai's recent visit to Vermont, where Pai once again repeated his (false) claim that gutting sector oversight (and net neutrality) will somehow magically result in better broadband in these historically neglected areas:

"A little rain did not stop Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai from climbing into a bucket loader and being hoisted to the top of a wireless hotspot in Springfield, Vermont, Wednesday...Pai says a free and open internet is in everyone's best interests. He says if the little guys are successful, competition goes up and costs go down. "So our hope going forward is that consumers would continue to be protected and the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, we are going to have much more infrastructure improvements than we have had in the past few years," Pai said.

Usually, the Commissioner is portrayed as folksy, relatable, and genuinely interested in making things better:

"I come from a very rural part of Kansas where there isn't a lot of connectivity. Some of the people who move there do move there just to get away from it all, as it were. Our goal is to get you wifi whether you want it or not," Pai joked. "No, I'm just kidding, our [goal] is to make sure every American who wants internet access is able to get it. So if you don't want it, great, but, at least when I travel around, I've met many, many people who are desperate for it. We want to make sure that kind of connectivity that we often take for granted in some of the bigger cities extends to those off-the-beaten-path places."

And that would be great...if the Pai FCC's policies actually reflected those statements. Perhaps Pai truly does believe that he's single-handedly curing the digital divide by giving industry giants like Comcast and AT&T every policy win they've ever dreamed of. But in reality Pai's policies continue to run in stark contrast to his stated goal of more competition, lower prices, and broader broadband availability.

For example last week the FCC quietly voted to cap spending on programs actually designed to bring broadband connectivity to the parts of the country that private ISPs don't deem profitable enough:

"Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed a new spending cap on the FCC's Universal Service programs that deploy broadband to poor people and to rural and other underserved areas.

Pai reportedly circulated the proposal to fellow commissioners on Tuesday, meaning it will be voted upon behind closed doors instead of in an open meeting. Pai has not released the proposal publicly, but it was described in a Politico report Wednesday, and an FCC official confirmed the proposal's details to Ars."

And a relentless Pai target has been the FCC's Lifeline program, an effort started by Reagan and expanded by Bush that long enjoyed bipartisan support until the post-truth era rolled into town. Lifeline doles out a measly $9.25 per month subsidy that low-income homes can use to help pay a tiny fraction of their wireless, phone, or broadband bills (enrolled participants have to chose one). The FCC under former FCC boss Tom Wheeler had voted to expand the service to cover broadband connections, something Pai (ever a champion to the poor) voted down. He's been attacking the program ever since.

There are endless other examples of Pai policies doing the exact opposite of what he promises during his town-to-town PR tours, yet none of these are reflected in any of the local coverage of these taxpayer-funded junkets.

The repeal of net neutrality and FCC privacy rules, for example, opens the door to the nickel-and-diming of consumers that already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for broadband. Pai's attacks on efforts to improve cable box competition ensure your cable box remains both closed and expensive to rent. Pai's FCC also recently gutted a program designed to make rural broadband more affordable in tribal areas, though the courts recently killed that effort after showcasing Pai's arguments weren't factually supportable.

Elsewhere, Pai's FCC has literally tried to weaken the definition of "competition," in a bid to obfuscate broadband deployment and competition shortcomings at behest of industry. And his agency can often be found demonizing community broadband efforts, which are an organic, local response to the private sector's obvious failure to uniformly deploy broadband across the country. This is all when Pai's FCC isn't busy protecting prison phone monopolies or gutting decades old media consolidation rules intended to protect diverse, local reporting.

The lion's share of Pai's policies support one real agenda: protecting the nation's biggest companies from disruption, competition, or accountability. It's not really debatable. Yet thanks to the slow and steady erosion of quality local reporting, not a week goes by where Pai isn't featured by some fluffy local PR piece that ignores all of this and portrays Pai as a "folksy" champion for a digital divide. Even though the lion's share of the FCC boss' policies are making many of these problems notably worse.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, fcc