CBN’s Signal To Noise Ratios

Now that there’s broad consensus high-speed Internet connectivity should be universally accessible, there’s no shortage of broadband news/content floating around out there.

There’s the wheat (more truthful, useful, and informative stuff); the chafe (a mundane grain of truth buried under a steaming pile of bs), and a vast spectrum of perspectives in between.

In this new space we will highlight insightful news stories, blog posts, podcasts, or videos we’ve come across over the past week or so – with an eye to separate the signal from the noise.

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What Happened to Gigi?

While the FCC has been defanged in many ways, the agency is still at the center of our shared telecommunication ecosystem. So when President Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to serve as the fifth and final commissioner to break the 2-2 partisan deadlock at the agency, numerous consumer and public interest groups were ecstatic. The nation’s telecommunication workers backed her nomination. She even had the respect and quiet support of a number of conservative lawmakers.

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But her nomination was sunk by a vicious smear campaign, which led her to withdraw herself from consideration in March.

At the Broadband Communities Summit in May she described the process both like being put in a “washing machine full of rocks” and going through “a 16 month proctology exam.”

After publishing a story back in November on “the mystery” behind the political hit job targeting Gigi, The Verge is back this week with a longer and more probing follow-up piece written by policy and politics reporter Makena Kelly.

It details the Machiavellian machinations that ultimately led her to withdraw her nomination. And you can probably guess which side of the Congressional aisle most of the Gigi slander came from (with a few notable exceptions from “centrist” Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat). No real surprises there. But The Verge went beyond naming names to raise a more interesting question:

“While conservatives may have opposed Sohn on social media, they remained a consistent minority — albeit by a slim margin — in the Senate. In the wake of her failed nomination, the big question isn’t why Republicans opposed a Democratic commissioner. It’s why Democrats, from Congress to the White House, failed to support her.”

The bottom-line: in the words Brandon Tucker, Color of Change Senior Director of Policy and Government Affairs:

“I do commend the White House for nominating and renominating a true champion and a tireless advocate, but it does feel as if once the writing’s on the wall, smear campaigns and the dark money entered the fray, there was not a counterpunch by her supporters.”

Of course, it’s hard to effectively counterpunch when the opposition has deep enough pockets to outspend Gigi’s public supporters. The story notes:

“Throughout the 2022 midterms, Comcast alone made nearly $9 million in political contributions and spent close to $14.5 million on lobbying, according to Federal Election Commission records. The company hired lobbyist Kirk Adams of Consilium Consulting in Phoenix, Arizona, to work on ‘FCC nominations’ specifically before that disclosure was deleted and replaced with ‘telecommunications policy’ 11 hours later, Ars Technica reported last year. AT&T and Verizon contributed similar amounts to both Democrats and Republicans during the last midterms cycle.”

“Telecom companies, like the ones that lobbied against Sohn’s nomination, are the only group that benefits from a dysfunctional FCC. Without a full slate of commissioners, these companies don’t need to fear tougher regulations or strict enforcement actions over failures to meet the regulations that are already in place.”

The signal in The Verge piece is strong and makes it well worth reading the whole story here.

The Red Flags of BEAD

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Two red flag stories caught our eye this week. Each focuses on a different requirement that would-be grant recipients need to meet in order to be eligible to use any of the $42.5 billion in BEAD funds.

Ever since the BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) was released in February 2022, community broadband advocates and small to midsize Internet service providers (ISPs) hoping that BEAD grants could help bring more competition and choice to the market sounded the alarm about the Labor and Letter of Credit requirements.

Doug Dawson’s POTS and PANs blog is a must-read. His most recent one is no different.

In it he calls attention to the NOFO’s labor rules, which Doug describes as “something written by bureaucrats who are designing a hypothetically perfect labor system instead of written by folks who have ever built a broadband network and have dealt with broadband contractors.”

He zeroes in on the rule that says an ISP must be able to document their past compliance with federal laws, including contractors or subcontractors hired to build networks. But, as Doug explains:

“The entire industry works on a system of primary construction contractors and a host of smaller subcontractor crews. Big ISPs like Charter and Frontier can easily identify their primary contractor because they will have them under contract to handle whatever future work comes along. Smaller ISPs typically find a primary contractor after they know they have a project – like after they win a grant.”

Neither Doug nor the team here at CBN is anti-union or advocating for underpaying construction crews. However, as Doug points out:

“Whoever wrote the NOFO has no understanding of the construction crews who build networks. There has been only a handful of certification programs around the industry for decades, and only a small percentage of technicians who build networks have any formal certification. I think every ISP will agree with me that they want a crew made up of construction veterans with a decade or two of experience rather than a crew that has technicians with newly minted certifications.”

“It’s hard to know if this is intentional, but like many of the BEAD requirements suggested by NTIA, these labor requirements greatly favor large ISPs over small ones.”

You can read Doug’s entire blog post here, as he is a master of separating the signal from the noise.

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The other BEAD red flag story of the week comes from a Connect Humanity blog post written by Calum Cameron. Calum focuses on another aspect of the BEAD NOFO that smaller independent ISPs have been pointing to for the past year as a major disincentive.

Calum begins the blog post with a concise description of the issue, why it matters, and what might be done about it:

“What’s the problem? BEAD, The US government’s $42 billion broadband grants program, requires recipients to provide a Letter of Credit for 25% of the grant award. Alongside the additional 25% match requirement, this capital barrier will shut out a huge number of ISPs.”

“Why it matters: The small and community-centered ISPs, minority and women-owned businesses, nonprofits, and municipalities that the program claims to be targeting will be most affected. These are the providers best positioned to connect un(der)-served Americans.”

“What we can do: There are alternatives that can safeguide taxpayer dollars while ensuring a wide pool of providers can participate in BEAD. Together, we must engage NTIA to explore these alternatives and ensure the ‘Equity’ is not lost from the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program.”

Calum makes the case that if the letter of credit requirement isn’t fixed or creatively altered, the program will likely lead to history repeating itself.

“By steering so much money to large incumbents rather than the small to medium ISPs best placed to end the digital divide, the administration risks repeating the mistakes of the past decade, in which the US Government spent $54 billion on broadband programs which went overwhelmingly to the largest providers, resulting in just 1% increase in Americans connected.”

Read his entire blog post here and see what he recommends as alternatives that would be “less onerous requirements for smaller ISPs, non-profits, and municipalities.”

Thankfully, a new coalition of ISPs, broadband associations, and digital equity advocates has formed to push back against the letter of credit mandate, as reported by Light Reading editor and The Divide podcast host Nicole Ferraro.

Header image courtesy of Creazilla, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication