RDOF Wasn't the Success Republicans Claim: Levin
New Street’s Blair Levin on Wednesday slammed the $20 billion rural digital opportunity fund, calling it a huge failure, during a Broadband Breakfast webinar. Approved under former President Donald Trump, RDOF has its defenders, including FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who has called it a bigger success than the BEAD program, which President Joe Biden approved (see 2409270032).
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“RDOF was a complete disaster -- it would have been so much better if it had never happened,” Levin said. “It was such a disaster that Congress no longer trusted the FCC to do various things, including the thing that they had done more than anyone else,” which is “rural communications deployment.” Congressional trust in the FCC “went down dramatically,” he added.
The Biden administration has tried addressing the digital divide “to the 100% level,” which is “about twice as hard as solving it to the 98% level,” Levin said. Much criticism of the Biden administration “ignores” the history and level of ambition the administration has shown, he said.
Morgan Lewis communications lawyer Andrew Lipman said he would give Biden a “B” on broadband policy. For Lipman, Biden’s greatest accomplishment was the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provides $65 billion for broadband deployment.
One negative of the infrastructure act is that it doesn’t relax permitting and licensing procedures, which have been “a real headwind to broadband,” Lipman said. Biden waited too long to get a Democratic majority on the FCC “and he lost some great opportunities.” Biden could have put more pressure on the DOD to cut a deal to make more spectrum available for 5G, he said. The administration could have also done more to make a deal on an extension of the affordable connectivity program, Lipman added.
The Biden administration has been able to target the digital divide with “an unbelievable amount of money,” said Summit Ridge Group President Armand Musey. The challenge was getting the money deployed, he said. “BEAD is taking forever,” adding, “It has really been a huge bureaucratic slog to get this money out and deployed.”
One of BEAD's big challenges is that it targets “really, really tough areas” for service, Musey said: Getting cost estimates isn’t easy, and they are “qualified with all kinds of caveats.” It involved areas where infrastructure companies have never built anything before and there’s no place for workers to stay overnight, he said. The government stuck with its fiber everywhere approach until it figured out how expensive some areas would be to build out, Musey argued.
One underappreciated Biden accomplishment is that, with the national spectrum strategy, the administration got DOD “seriously engaged” on “how to share spectrum,” Musey said. “That’s an enormous challenge that’s going to take a long time to work through -- it’s not something [where] you can just flip a switch and tell the military to start sharing spectrum.” Huge amounts of information must be exchanged with tight controls, he said. “Those dialogues are actually happening now.”
Some criticism of BEAD is “overblown,” said Joe Kane, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation director-broadband and spectrum policy. The statute requires a “back-and-forth process” between the states and federal government, he said. For many years, broadband deployment hasn’t been the cause of the digital divide, “but it still gets the vast majority of federal funding.”
Affordability is a much bigger cause of the divide, but extension of the ACP “didn’t seem to be a big priority for the Biden administration,” Kane said. He acknowledged failure to provide more money for ACP was Congress' fault, with much of the opposition coming from Republicans. “There was a deal to be struck” and there could have been bipartisan support for “some kind of reformed ACP,” he said.
The national spectrum strategy is “probably moving the conversation in the right direction,” Kane said: “I hope the next administration continues that.”
Lipman said BEAD was an easy target for Republicans during the 2024 presidential election and the administration probably could have moved faster on parts of the program. But he agreed with Kane that criticism is overblown. “Anytime you have this back and forth between the states and the NTIA and ... the challenge process and the like, it just is going to take a while.”
The alternative was to have the federal government pick winners and losers, Lipman said: “We saw how that worked out under RDOF.”
Because of “the RDOF screw up,” Congress put controls on BEAD funding that have led to a program that will take a long time to complete, Levin said. “You have to understand the history.” Kane said the Biden administration shouldn’t be blamed for a process that Congress created. “It was always going to take a long time,” he said.