Tech experts hope for friendlier regulations for broadband deployment in 2018
President Donald Trump has indicated he plans to move forward with increased infrastructure spending in 2018. Tom Struble, technology policy manager at R Street Institute, said broadband should be a big part of the package, in addition to repairing roads and bridges.
“A lot of that has to include broadband because that is such a needy area,” Struble said.
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Struble said he can’t imagine a Republican-majority Congress supporting a federal build-out of broadband infrastructure, but he could see more funds put into a U.S. Department of Agriculture program designed to aid rural broadband growth.
“If the federal government puts public dollars into broadband, I think it will come in the form of the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), which offers block grants to ISPs to build broadband infrastructure in rural areas where there isn’t enough demand for the market to deploy on its own,” he said. “I think that’s a likely place that Republicans would be willing to support spending federal dollars when it goes to rural broadband because the urban-rural broadband divide is much more stark than the rich-poor divide.”
Cities eye a bigger piece of the taxpayer pie
Struble said some cities are charging market-based fees – what he calls “eye-watering prices” – rather than the actual cost of maintenance to providers for access to utility poles, cell towers and the like. He said it’s a sneaky way to capture more revenue without passing a tax. And when the increased costs to providers are passed on to consumers, the public’s ire is directed toward those businesses.
“We’ve argued the FCC should come in and preempt these localities that are charging broadband providers out the ear to get access to public rights of way, which they need to do to deploy or upgrade infrastructure,” Struble said.
It’s not so cut-and-dried, however, as it’s unclear if the FCC has the power to preempt local regulations. But he noted that states absolutely have that authority.
“I think that would be a tremendous help – probably more than anything Congress at the federal level could do – if states could force localities to adopt more favorable deployment regulations and laws,” Struble said.
One issue Congress could certainly help with, he noted, is increasing the depreciation rate for equipment used in internet deployment. He noted that copper is still more common than fiber in many rural areas, as providers are slow to make the costly upgrade to the newer technology.
“To get more competition and choice in the short term, what we need is for the telecos to upgrade their networks, supplement their copper with more fiber so they can get faster speeds, and one of the easiest ways to do that would be to allow them to write off all of their copper wiring as depreciating assets.”
