To Withstand Emergencies Like Helene, Broadband Policies Need to Last

It’s clear we need more resiliency in our broadband policy. If nothing else, the hurricanes ravaging the U.S. Southeast have shown us that.

In the last few weeks, pervasive wireless and wireline communication outages have left people that are already struggling in the wake of disaster completely cut off from resources, important news updates, and loved ones. Going forward, we could mitigate this risk by designing our networks with resiliency in mind—like by constructing overlapping networks where possible.

If every household could reach the outside world by both a cell tower and a fixed broadband connection, then when one of them went down—as has happened for millions of people in areas hit by Hurricane Helene—they might not be completely cut off. And Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can be harnessed to provide basic mobile phone connectivity that enables emergency alerts and texting when other forms of communication fail.

The need to build resilience into digital infrastructure

Building resilience into our digital infrastructure is an obvious must. But without resilient policies, U.S. broadband networks will never be able to weather the increasing intense storms. Policymakers must continue to push forward strong, consistent, and consumer-friendly broadband policies—regardless of whether disasters are taking place and making headlines.

In 2024, we’re still figuring out broadband mapping; the biggest federal broadband deployment program in history is seeing pushback; the backbone of universal service is under attack; and an enormously effective consumer-side subsidy program was killed through inaction.

The current lukewarm broadband policy landscape is puzzling considering just how much attention and action U.S. connectivity received only a few years back.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, universal broadband access became an indisputable public priority, and policymakers took action accordingly. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 authorized major programs like the $288 million Broadband Infrastructure Program and the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB), which funded deployment and affordability respectively. Then the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act put $65 billion into massive broadband access programs, including the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) and Digital Equity Act programs.

It also transitioned EBB into the Affordable Connectivity Program, which ultimately helped one in six American households get and stay online. Later, once Congress finally confirmed a fifth Commissioner to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency had the votes to pass vital regulations enacting guardrails against digital discrimination and net neutrality violations—ensuring some level of governance over the companies that provide us with one of the most important resources of our time.

These developments represented huge strides toward solving some of the digital divide’s fundamental causes and creating regulatory guardrails around our future. As recently as 2023, a fifth of households still didn’t have high-speed internet at home. People without internet access face disadvantages in access to healthcare, education, communication, and critical resources like government programs.

They often earn lower incomes and miss out on honing important digital skills. Facing overwhelming evidence that broadband is necessary in 21st-century life, programs like those funded by IIJA were our last shot to catch up to an already-established reality.

Are we forgetting hard-earned lessons as COVID recedes?

But as the immediacy of the COVID emergency recedes, we seem to be forgetting the hard-earned lessons of that period. Policymakers are pushing back against BEAD’s implementation—criticizing its timeline, decrying its affordability mandates (which are measures to ensure the mostly publicly-funded broadband networks can actually be used by the very people they’re meant to serve). And they’re spending valuable time and resources conducting hearings to criticize agencies for taking pro-consumer action, instead of supporting them in their enormous task.

Simultaneously, the FCC is tied up in court over its authority to hold the broadband industry accountable and enforce net neutrality rules. The Universal Service Fund—which funds infrastructure buildout in the hardest-to-reach locations, offers some baseline affordability assistance, and ensures service for libraries and schools—is also under legal attack. It was last ruled unconstitutional and now waits in limbo for a Supreme Court decision.

At a time when our total reliance on digital infrastructure is widely acknowledged but regularly under threat from extreme weather events like Hurricanes Helene and Milton (and Maria before them), the need for an FCC that’s empowered to enforce strong consumer protections should not be in question. The push to finally close all infrastructure gaps is long overdue.

And there is no excuse for Congress’s failure to revive the ACP—a uniformly popular and highly effective broadband subsidy program—when affordability remains a major barrier to broadband access and when the success of the $42.5 billion earmarked through BEAD relies, in part, on the demand created by the ACP.

COVID-era broadband programs offered a welcome fix for the remaining digital divide, but it shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to get us there in the first place. We now have consensus that broad connectivity is a goal worth pursuing—we shouldn’t wait for another crisis to follow through.

We need more resiliency in our broadband policy, yes, but we need it in more ways than one. If Congress won’t reliably incorporate broadband improvement into its priorities, and policies remain subject to partisan backswings, then state governments will need to act—or consumers will need to make their priorities clear to elected officials.

Jessica Dine is a policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute and Wireless Future Project, where she focuses on a range of issues including broadband access and adoption, spectrum policy, and competition. This Expert Opinion is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.

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