Cable Caution Counseled on Broadband Funding
Cable operators need to be vigilant about threats of being overbuilt as tens of billions of federal dollars are poised to be directed toward broadband projects in coming years, said cable lawyer Tom Cohen of Kelley Drye Wednesday at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2021. The broadband infrastructure funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, if passed, would take a year or so to be implemented and could start flowing in 2022 (see 2110120038), he said. That could give incumbents time to get ahead of competition and also think about what unserved areas nearby that could be grabbed, he said.
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ACA Connects officials think the bill's failure to pass would leave a huge hole in deployment program funding, with big question marks about how it gets filled. ACA Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman said such a dent in deployment programs could necessitate USF reform by the FCC.
The $42.5 billion in broadband infrastructure funding would follow American Rescue Plan Act block grants that can be used for broadband and are starting to flow to state and local governments, Cohen said. Those grants also are both an opportunity for network expansion and a reason to be concerned about being overbuilt, he said.
Those block grants and NTIA doling out broadband infrastructure funding to states in the infrastructure bill point to Congress seeming to believe the best way for government to facilitate broadband adoption is to get the money to localities, Cohen said. The FCC is objective in doling out funding, but "it got a bit of a black eye" in Rural Digital Opportunity Fund implementation, so it's unsurprising the money is now flowing through the Commerce Department and the states, he said.
Lieberman said if the broadband infrastructure funding passes, it could be late 2022 or early '23 before the FCC issues its updated broadband maps, which would be used by states to craft their deployment plans, and NTIA evaluates them. Cohen said because NTIA has to approve state plans under the legislation, there will likely be some uniformity about what states do and how they do it. With the legislation setting some criteria for what projects are funding-eligible, Cohen said the criteria could determine what technology is used in some projects. The requirement for network outages to be limited to at most 48 hours on average over any 365-day period could nix use of wireless in hurricane territory in favor of fiber, he said.
Lieberman said states could end up with "something of a beauty pageant" in deciding which projects are first in line for funding. There will likely be room for state and local officials to give more weight to particular programs, and politics surely will play some role in what gets funded first, echoed Cohen.