FCC Official Says Broadband Team Facing Data Hole

“To the extent that it’s important to you all that we reach sensible business decisions, you really need to step up and provide us the data that you as business leaders use to make business decisions,” Curtis said. “That’s the only way we're going to reach the kind of conclusions I think everybody wants.” Curtis said his broadband team has a saying: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” The team hears “lots of stories” about problems, but “you can’t build a business case on those anecdotes,” he said. One thing that might help is if companies sent the FCC any data filed with stimulus applications to the NTIA and the Rural Utilities Service, he said.

The plan’s definition of broadband isn’t set, Curtis said. “We have a very poor understanding as an industry … on how much bandwidth we need,” he said. Curtis said his team has talked to many leading experts, but “I'm not sure anybody really knows, before you start operating, how much is enough.”

The biggest bottlenecks to broadband deployment at the moment seem to be the second and middle miles, Curtis said. He defined the second mile as the transport piece connecting the central office to a cell tower, cable node or other facility that connects to the end user over the last mile. “It’s not entirely clear to me that the last mile is the bottleneck,” because it can be handled without great expense using installed copper, for example, Curtis said. The record is “underdeveloped” on whether the backbone is a bottleneck, he said.

Curtis said to expect the broadband plan to be an “evolutionary process” that will continue after the Feb. 17 deadline for its submission. Congress gave the FCC a year to write the plan, “but the reality is the chairman didn’t get confirmed until sometime in July, the team didn’t get formed until sometime in August,” Curtis said. It’s “a ton of work to get done. And I think what you'll see is we'll get a lot of it done and [make] pretty robust recommendations.” But “there’s a lot more that will need to be done and that will come,” he said.

The first round of the broadband stimulus programs “went pretty well, all things considered,” said Angie Simpson, an adviser to NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. It was an “entirely new program under incredible time pressure,” and “for the most part” the agencies didn’t have “our political leadership in place,” she said. Collaborating with the RUS was a good decision, Simpson said. The “worst thing that happened” was the capacity issues on the online system that led to the agencies delaying the applications deadline, she said.

The agencies are looking for ways to streamline work in the second round for applicants and reviewers. Those interested can make suggestions when the agencies put out a request for information this month. They're looking for ways to make it easier to apply and to understand rules, and they're considering changes from the first notice of fund availability to fulfill the stimulus law’s purpose better, Simpson said. “It’s an open book, really.”

The NTIA’s use of volunteers has “worked out OK,” Simpson said. “We got a lot of people and a lot of good people.” The NTIA “could always use more,” to speed up the reviews, she said. The volunteers are unpaid, so the agency has to “accommodate their needs and schedules,” she said. That has stretched out reviews, Simpson said.

Agencies will give first-round applicants comments on rejected applications and may encourage some to try again, Simpson said. The agencies plan to give second-round applicants a sense of the kind of collaborative and detailed projects that are going to be successful, she said. How agencies will provide feedback to rejected first-round applicants is still being worked out, she said.

The agencies are coordinating with the FCC and sharing information with it, Simpson said. She doesn’t expect the NTIA’s and the RUS’s work to “run counter” to what the FCC decides in the National Broadband Plan. But Simpson acknowledged that “in a perfect world, the horse would be before the cart.”

For applicants, the experience was “a little overwhelming because it was all new territory,” said Clearwire Vice President Cathleen Massey. But workshops were helpful, and overall the process went “incredibly well,” she said. Despite the IT glitch with the submission system, all that wanted to file were able to, Massey said. The capacity problems weren’t surprising, since there was so much “going in at the same moment,” she said. Kodiak-Kenai Cable CEO Walt Ebell agreed that the application process was “more complex” than had been expected at first. But he said the stimulus program seems to be “progressing well.”

Working on applications can be a business “distraction” if the applicant doesn’t have a “really good solid proposal” that makes it worthwhile to pull people off other projects, Massey said. She recommended that applicants immediately assess how to do backhaul for a given rural remote area, she said. “Once you establish that, you can determine whether the project will work.” It’s almost necessary to set up a separate company to handle compliance matters such as audits and abiding by federal regulations, she added.

It would have been better if the FCC’s national plan had come before any spending on broadband, said Scot Eberle, the president of the Fiberutilities group. But a plan is still needed to establish a vision and set industry in the right direction, he said. “Without it, we're just doing Band-Aid stuff.”