From the 12 Days of Broadband:

• On the Twelfth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
  12 or More State Broadband Officers
  11th Year of Xi Jinping’s rule in China
  $10 Billion Remaining in the Affordable Connectivity Program
  $9 Billion Universal Service Fund
  8,132,968 census blocks and a national Broadband Fabric
  7.7% annual inflation rate
  Wi-Fi 6E
  5 Federal Communications Commissioners
  $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funds
  Section Two-30 of the Communications Decency Act
  24 Reverse-Preemption Pole Attachment States
  and A Symmetrical Gigabit Network.

State broadband officials must administer funding programs, build broadband availability maps, promote digital equity, coordinate with federal agencies, and much more. They have consistently argued that engaging robust staking engagement and diverse partnerships is indispensable to their success.

Although the bulk of the broadband industry’s scrutiny is now directed federal government, the source of what many experts call a “once-in-a-generation” investment in broadband infrastructure, once those grants are issued to the states, state officials must plan and oversee the final disbursal of those funds.

 Download the complete 12 Days of Broadband report

Many states’ broadband offices are young, understaffed, and under-resourced. In a conversation with Broadband Breakfast, Ramon S. Hobdey-Sanchez, the broadband program manager at the Idaho Department of Commerce, explained that his small office faces myriad challenges, both geographic (extensive mountains and rivers) and technical (limited middle-mile infrastructure).

Hobdey-Sanchez said his office seeks to educate Idaho communities. With representatives from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the state recently hosted a local-coordination conference attended by hundreds of Idahoans, he said, adding that his constituents are concerned about navigating the complexities of grant writing and local permitting regimes.

At October’s AnchorNets 2022 conference, Louisiana’s broadband director, Veneeth Iyengar, said extensive and recurring local feedback has illuminated his office’s “blindspots.” 

Glen Howie, broadband director of Arkansas and an alumnus of Louisiana’s broadband office, has said that he, too, encourages ground-up leadership from local officials. “It’s not really about Washington, and it’s not even really about Little Rock, it’s about” local communities, Howie told the audience at Broadband Breakfast’s Digital Infrastructure Investment conference in November.

At Digital Infrastructure Investment, Kenrick Gordon, Maryland’s broadband director, said that his state prioritizes the funding applications of community-backed providers.

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development told Broadband Breakfast that the Keystone State has partnered with Penn State Extension assess the accuracy of the FCC’s mapping data and facilitate a forthcoming bulk challenge. The spokesperson emphasized the importance of public participation in the challenge process as well.

Illinois broadband officials have in part credited the successes of the state’s mapping initiative to specialized local knowledge provided by community leaders. Maine Connectivity Authority President Andrew Butcher told Broadband Breakfast that he will rally communities and other stakeholders to correct the Federal Communications Commission’s newly released national broadband map. 

Kansas broadband director, Jade Piros de Carvalho, said her office lacks the resources to submit a fabric challenge, but asked Kansans to submit individual challenges.

Hobdey-Sanchez said he hopes to submit a bulk challenge to the FCC’s map by mid-January. Idaho will soon build a state broadband map, he said, and is likely to announce the award of the mapping contract by the end of December.

There is no shortage of state-mapping models, and existing maps often clash with the FCC’s datasets. Georgia and North Carolina, for instance, which used a fabric-based and a speed-test model, respectively, suggest that Washington has severely overestimated service coverage, according to a report published earlier this year.

In October, Piros de Carvalho and Joshua Breitbart, senior vice president of New York State’s ConnectALL program, told the 2022 INCOMPAS Show that input from private industry helps state officials structure funding programs to be more attractive to private dollars. Kansas “encourage[s] new entrants into markets that have been ignored or are only being served by satellite or DSL,” the Kansas director said.

States must also bolster the broadband workforce, which many experts say is too small and inexperienced. “What we’re focused on in Ohio is building out career pathways so that individuals can understand what the different paths there are for them to move up in the industry,” said Eric Leach, deputy director of Ohio Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation, at a November Broadband Breakfast Live Online event discussing a state partnership with Ohio State University. “It’s really about creating a career ladder,” he added.

From the 12 Days of Broadband:

• On the Eleventh Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
  11th Year of Xi Jinping’s rule in China
  $10 Billion Remaining in the Affordable Connectivity Program
  $9 Billion Universal Service Fund
  8,132,968 census blocks and a national Broadband Fabric
  7.7% annual inflation rate
  Wi-Fi 6E
  5 Federal Communications Commissioners
  $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funds
  Section Two-30 of the Communications Decency Act
  24 Reverse-Preemption Pole Attachment States
  and A Symmetrical Gigabit Network.

Year by year, tensions between the U.S. and China continue to grow. And in this Cold War 2.0, the battle over information technology and policy often appears to be at the heart of the conflict.

Chinese telecommunications equipment giant Huawei has been effectively barred from the U.S. market for well over a year. But the constraints are tightening. And while Huawei has been central to China’s global communications aspirations, disputes over technology are now affecting all sorts of Chinese-owned companies. Even ByteDance’s TikTok, arguably the world’s hottest social media company with more than 100 million U.S. users, now appears in jeopardy.

 Download the complete 12 Days of Broadband report

After two decades in which the countries’ economies and technology industries converged, they are now coming apart. Remember the American perception of China at the time of the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008? China was regarded as a global competitor, but not an adversary.

Contrast that with the near-boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics of 2022 by American officials over persecution of the Uyghurs and retrenchment of political freedom in Hong Kong. Just prior to this year’s games, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and declared that “friendship between the two States has no limits,” effectively blessing the Russian invasion of Ukraine that happened later in February.

And now that Xi has entered, in October, his 11th year of rule, he’s broken free of the two-term limit that had governed Chinese leaders in the modern era. Xi’s continuing hold on power seems to highlight divergences between the world’s two economic superpowers.

Take bans on Chinese hardware. In November, the Federal Communications Commission published a modification of certification rules that will bar technologies from the U.S. that are considered threats to national security.

The commission’s latest action will keep Huawei, ZTE and many other companies from gathering data on and surveilling American citizens. The action will also keep the FCC from issuing further authorizations for covered technologies, without which those technologies may not be imported to or marketed in the United States. 

The FCC first took steps against these Chinese manufacturers in 2019 by disallowing the use of Universal Service Funds for their purchase.

In March 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed into law the Secure Networks Act, requiring the FCC to prohibit the use of moneys it administers for the acquisition of designated communications equipment. The act promoted the removal of existing equipment deemed compromised through a $2 billion reimbursement program designed to “rip and replace” Huawei and other Chinese equipment out of telecommunications networks, particularly those of rural broadband providers.

The latest FCC action aims to stop entities from “re-branding” or “white labeling” equipment by those covered Chinese manufacturers.

And now legislators are going after Chinese-owned apps like TikTok.

On Dec. 14, the Senate unanimously passed a measure to ban TikTok from U.S. government devices, in a move designed to limit perceived information-security risks stemming from the social media app. The measure, by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., follows similar actions by state governments, including Maryland.

The app is itself is in jeopardy of being banned outright in the United States under a bill introduced on Dec. 13 by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill. They said the move was warranted by the Chinese potentially using the video sharing platform to spy on Americans.

Speaking at a Broadband Breakfast Live Online event on Dec. 7, Rick Lane, CEO of Iggy Ventures, said that he supported such a ban and predicted that it would happen within six months.

If that were to happen, information policy in the United States might look a lot more like that of China. There, American apps like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube are banned.

From the 12 Days of Broadband:

• On the Tenth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me:
  $10 Billion Remaining in the Affordable Connectivity Program
  $9 Billion Universal Service Fund
  8,132,968 census blocks and a national Broadband Fabric
  7.7% annual inflation rate
  Wi-Fi 6E
  5 Federal Communications Commissioners
  $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funds
  Section Two-30 of the Communications Decency Act
  24 Reverse-Preemption Pole Attachment States
  and A Symmetrical Gigabit Network.

Some say that people are not enrolling in the Federal Communications Commission’s new subsidy for low-income households, the Affordable Connectivity Program. Others say that at the rate people are subscribing, the fund will soon run out of money.  

At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Dec. 13, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance warned that the ACP is at risk of being deplenished. “Unless Congress takes action, this vital program will go away in just a few short years,” said the nonprofit’s executive director Angela Siefer at the hearing.

 Download the complete 12 Days of Broadband report

Jonathan Spalter, head of broadband industry association US Telecom, warned the fund could run out of money by 2024. Both Spalter and the NDIA urged Congress to make the program permanent.

Despite this, more than $10 billion of the $14.2 billion program is still unallocated, according to an analysis by the Institute for Local Self Reliance. Just over 15 million (224,000 tribal) out of 37 million households are enrolled as of December, show data from the FCC’s program administrator, the Universal Service Administrative Company.

The program builds off the Emergency Broadband Benefit funded by the $2.3 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021,  passed on Dec. 30, 2020. The temporary EBB was transformed into the longer-lasting ACP under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of November 2021. The ACP offers a discount of up to $30 per month on a wireline or wireless broadband connection ($75 on tribal lands) and a one-time device discount of $100. Eligible Americans include those on programs including SNAP, Medicaid, Federal Public Housing Assistance, Lifeline and federal Pell grants.

To close the funding and enrollment gap, this summer the FCC launched the Affordable Connectivity Outreach Grant Program. The $100 million fund will support four separate marketing programs: The $60 million National Competitive Outreach Program, the $10 million Tribal Competitive Outreach Program, the $5 million Your Home, Your Internet Program and the $5 million ACP Navigator Pilot Program. 

Internet service providers have also been emailing subscribers about the program and hosting events in apartment complexes promoting it. Meanwhile, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is allowing applicants for broadband infrastructure planning grants to use money toward promoting the ACP.

The National Lifeline Association, a nonprofit group advocating for these broadband programs, has been urging the continued sustainability of the fund and promoting improvements. In a survey of 60,000 ACP enrollees released Dec. 14, 95 percent said they are consuming mobile broadband beyond their monthly data caps.

With 55 percent of ACP enrollees (about 8 million subscribers) on mobile broadband, according to USAC data, the NLA is urging the FCC to make available more affordable data.

But with the race to sign on as many households as possible, the program has also fallen into predatory hands. The FCC’s Office of Inspector General found in a September report evidence of ACP enrollment fraud, where a service provider would repeatedly sign on dozens or even hundreds of households using the information of a single qualifying person. Similar evidence of fraud was found under the program’s predecessor, where providers were signing up more households than students in schools.

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said in October that he sent letters to 13 service providers out of more than 1,300 program participants requesting information on potential “abusive, misleading, fraudulent, or otherwise predatory behaviors” in both ACP and EBB programs. 

The FCC in November ordered annual reports on the ACP to gauge who is involved in the program and how the funds are being used.

Looking forward, the Republicans, who retook the House of Representatives following the November midterm elections, have already promised heightened oversight of the FCC and increased scrutiny of broadband programs specifically.