COVID-19 Lessons Include Digital Divide, Agree O'Rielly, Rosenworcel
COVID-19 shows no one solution will fully address the U.S. digital divide, and wireless will play a bigger role worldwide, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said at the virtual European Spectrum Management Conference. He and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel agreed there are…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
lessons to be learned. Earlier last week, Facebook and other executives spoke at the event (see 2006250072). “Some policymakers would love to have fiber to everybody’s home,” O’Rielly said Friday. “I don’t think that’s sustainable. We have a very scattered population. In some of the more rural parts of America, it’s just not economical.” The FCC shouldn’t “put its finger on the scale” in favor of any technology, he said. If fixed wireless or satellite is the best solution in an area, O’Rielly said he would accept lower connection speeds. “Give me a Chevy over a Lamborghini,” he said: “I need to get more Chevys out there so everyone is connected.” O’Rielly said the pandemic is an FCC challenge: “How do we expand in a short timeframe broadband access as quickly as possible, in some instances patchwork networks, to get up and running for those people who don’t have” broadband, while “making sure that for those that do, the network is sustainable and doing fairly well?” And "we just moved into the future very fast,” Rosenworcel said. “Our bandwidth demands are real and they’re big.” We’re starting to “realize with total and complete clarity who has access, who doesn’t, what bandwidth is necessary to accomplish all of these things at home and what’s not, and how outages affect our networks.” The novel coronavirus is “really telling us a lot of what the future of communications needs to look like,” she said. Before, “I didn’t know there were so many screens in my house until everyone was home and now they’re all often operational" at once, said Jayne Stancavage, Intel global executive director-digital infrastructure policy, who interviewed the commissioners. The U.S. has hit a turning point, she said. “People actually understand how important our digital infrastructure is now and how much it is a part of our lives.”