Tech Neutrality Shouldn't Mean Interchangeability in BEAD: New America
BEAD's pivot toward supposed tech neutrality is concerning if it treats alternatives to fiber such as low earth orbit satellites or fixed wireless as interchangeable with fiber, New America blogged Monday. LEO and fixed wireless have lower upfront deployment costs than fiber, but a fiber connection has vastly more capacity than LEO and a useful life of dozens of years, it said. Fiber might be more expensive upfront, but it could save replacement later, New America said, adding states must ensure that plans for universal access will be viable long-term solutions, it added. There also is a trade-off between fiber and LEO on service quality, New America said: SpaceX's Starlink service intermittently meets 100/20 Mbps speeds, while fiber capacity is more likely to be sufficient in the future, even given growing consumer bandwidth needs.
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NTIA's BEAD guidance doesn't preclude LEO or fixed wireless, it said, so merely removing fiber prioritization "shouldn't do any real harm." But NTIA setting a low nationwide cap on the per-location cost of fiber "would ignore the variability in deployment needs and costs across the country and only increase the likelihood that communities are forced into communications solutions that are wrong for them. "For example, rural households could end up "in a particularly untenable position" if BEAD forces states to use satellite broadband beyond what makes sense and if they can't use BEAD funding to reduce consumers' monthly costs. "BEAD should use all technologies, but not all technologies are equal," New America said. "If NTIA starts treating them like they are, it won’t really be practicing tech neutrality at all."