Providers Debate Scoring for USF Payments to Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands for Broadband
Telecom, fiber and satellite parties interested in expanding their broadband footprints in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands met with aides to FCC commissioners and officials at the agency's Wireline Bureau over the past few weeks to share their concerns over a new wave of awards in the Uniendo a Puerto Rico Fund and the Connect USVI Fund in docket 18-143. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai issued a draft order this month on how the agency will allocate $950 million in USF dollars to providers for rebuilding and strengthening broadband networks in those territories after the devastating hurricanes Maria and Irma hit within a two-week period in 2017 (see 1909050043).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
"Thankfully, two years later, communications networks on the islands have largely been restored," Pai said in an opinion piece Wednesday in El Nueva Dia. He said his top three priorities to "improve, expand and harden" broadband networks on the islands are: Support the most cost-effective competitive applications; promote fixed broadband providers that promise gigabit service speeds or more, plus 5G wireless technology deployment; and favor reliable and resilient communications networks. The agency "will favor more resilient technology solutions like buried fiber over things like aerial wires strung on utility poles," Pai wrote.
FCC commissioners were still discussing possible draft changes Wednesday, including minor adjustments to the methods for scoring network resiliency. Specifically, stronger composite poles with better wind ratings could be favored over less-sturdy utility poles, though buried fiber would be the preferred method of fiber infrastructure, an official suggested.
Virgin Islands Telephone (dba Viya) said earlier this month "lightweight fiber on storm-resistant poles is much more resilient than heavy copper on standard poles." The company also told the agency "not all aerial facilities are equally vulnerable to hurricanes. Composite poles are far more resilient than wooden poles" and deserve to be scored differently in the funding program.
Other factors play into resiliency of aerial facilities, said Broadband VI, including "how deep the poles are placed in the ground, soil composition and loading on the poles."
Satellite broadband has special resiliency attributes for hurricane-prone islands because its internet gateway infrastructure remains off-island, Jennifer Manner, Hughes Network Systems senior vice president-regulatory affairs, told us. "The base station is in the sky" 22,300 miles away in a geostationary orbit, and Hughes keeps its gateway stations spread across the country in places that tend to be dry, she said. If one station goes down, Hughes can switch to another, Manner said. She would have liked to see more recognition of satellite broadband technology in the draft order.
The Fiber Broadband Association supports "the FCC's efforts to deploy fast and reliable networks across Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands," emailed CEO Lisa Youngers. "But our research shows that the methodology proposed for weighting bids in this auction actually will disincentivize high-performance broadband providers from participating." She encouraged the agency to spend federal funds "on high-quality all-fiber networks" because consumers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands deserve the networks to be "future-proof."
FBA used earlier USF Connect America Fund phase II auctions as comparisons in a recent ex parte filing, saying because the weighting methodology used then provided only a 45 percent point discount from the gigabit tier to the low-latency baseline tier, "gigabit providers did not bid for over three-quarters of the locations in the auction," and ultimately, only 19 percent of locations were awarded at the gigabit performance tier. FBA recommends the FCC increase the proposed point discount for gigabit service.
Buried fiber is the most robust transmission media in areas prone to natural disasters, FBA said, because water doesn't corrode it. Also, "fiber networks tend to have active electronics housed in central offices or similar points of aggregation in well constructed buildings and not in outdoor cabinets in the field," it said.
The draft order "places the highest importance in the bidding process on price per location," and the lowest on network resiliency, said a WorldNet filing. The order should be shifted so performance is first, resiliency second, and price third, WorldNet said.
Combining broadband technologies could help boost network resiliency and redundancy, said Puerto Rico Telephone. "Although aerial wireline alone is less resilient than buried fiber alone, aerial wireline combined with a fixed wireless redundancy plan is likely more resilient," it said, though the FCC draft doesn't recognize the example.
A vote Thursday on funding for the islands is expected to get bipartisan backing. Pai and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel visited the islands last year (see 1803070054).
Dozens of advocacy groups sent a letter Friday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., asking Congress to hold hearings on the status of telecom infrastructure on the islands. "Investigating what happened to Puerto Rico is critical to adopting policies that could help Puerto Ricans, communities of color and poor people who are often the most impacted by climate change," they wrote.