The focus on expanding fiber-based infrastructure as a foundational ingredient of the White House’s broadband strategy was perhaps ill-advised, observers say. However, positioning high-speed Internet as a necessary and modern piece of public infrastructure will be a lasting legacy of President Joe Biden’s signature domestic policy legislation.
“I think the biggest success is making broadband part of infrastructure. I think that transcends the desire to make low-cost broadband available,” said Andrew D. Lipman, a partner with the legal firm Morgan Lewis, specializing in technology communications. Lipman spoke Wednesday on a panel organized by Broadband Breakfast, a news and policy organization focused on broadband technology.
The panel discussion examined the lasting legacy — and missed opportunities — of the outgoing Biden administration related to the expansion of broadband. The landmark 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the Biden White House moved across the congressional finish line with bipartisan support, made some $65 billion available to expand broadband access and availability. The program’s key feature is the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, a $42.5 billion initiative to expand broadband infrastructure where it is lacking.
“The most important thing is, they put their money where their mouth was,” Lipman said. “And that was more than other administrations. There was a big effort with financial capital.”
However, the legislation included a number of technical and other requirements, namely a preference for building out fiber communications as the foundational piece of infrastructure — a costly venture in many rural and hard-to-reach locations.
Joe Kane, director of broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argued the fiber requirement redirected policy goals toward infrastructure deployment at the expense of closing the digital divide.
“I think it depends on what you’re trying to do with your broadband policy. If you’re trying to deploy a lot of fiber, then yes, spending a lot of money on fiber makes sense,” Kane said.
“But if you’re trying to close the digital divide, then spending your broadband money on fiber, when that is a vanishingly small reason for the digital divide, is a bad policy,” he added, advocating for spending “less money to serve people as cheaply as possible,” and the rest of it on adoption programs. That, said Kane, ”will do more to close the digital divide than you will get by spending tens of thousands of dollars to build fiber to places.”
The director was somewhat more bullish on newer technologies like satellite communications infrastructure, such as that used by companies like Starlink.
“I do believe that the satellite companies have all but solved the deployment issue for the build-out problem,” Kane said. Deployment he noted, “has not been the main cause of the digital divide for a long time. But still gets the vast majority of federal funding. And with BEAD, we’re preparing to spend billions of dollars in unnecessary fiber deployments.”
The emphasis on fiber, said J. Armand Musey, president and founder of the Summit Ridge Group, a technology consulting firm, “was, I think, terrible.”
Politicians from either major party tend to prefer fiber because of the number of jobs this infrastructure creates, he said, but in remote and rural areas, stringing many miles of fiber to serve a few homes and businesses makes little business sense.
“The cost of serving some of these homes are more than the homes cost themselves. It would be cheaper to actually move the people,” he said, adding, ‘the restrictions on satellite are starting to soften a bit.”
A posture of embracing satellite technology could receive more enthusiastic support in the coming Donald Trump administration. Elon Musk, a staunch supporter of the past and future president, who donated more than $250 million to Trump’s 2024 election, is the CEO of SpaceX, which owns Starlink.
Diane Rinaldo, the former acting administrator of the NTIA during the first Trump administration, has said the BEAD program could gravitate toward becoming more “technology neutral.”
“I can see the Trump administration move toward a more tech-neutral approach, as opposed to a fiber preference,” Rinaldo said during the Connecting Communities Summit in Milpitas, Calif., in November.