Fiber Alone Won't Reach All Unserved Customers, Panelists Say
NASHVILLE -- When the FCC weighs bids in its Connect America Fund Phase II auction, the commission should place more importance on reaching the most unserved people rather than providing the highest speeds, broadband industry officials said on a Monday panel at the NARUC 2016 Summer Committee Meetings. That means looking to multiple technologies to provide service, they said. But the chief of a rural electric cooperative said fiber provides the longest-lasting service for satisfying customers without compromise.
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The FCC is considering rules for the CAF II reverse auction, which aims to use a competitive bidding process to reach price-cap areas where incumbents are not receiving CAF support (see 1607220057). The Further NPRM and order approved May 25 will provide $215 million in annual broadband and voice support (see 1605250046 and 1605260034)
Even the lowest broadband speeds the FCC is considering will be a “life changer” for Americans who have never had broadband, said Michael Saperstein, Frontier vice president-federal regulatory affairs. The FCC’s goal should be to serve as many people as possible, even if it means some get lower speeds than people in urban areas, he said. Frontier has price-sensitive customers who may not want to pay for higher speeds, he added. “We really have to focus on getting broadband out to the maximum amount of people as opposed to trying to gold-plate the network and get fiber out as deep as possible," he said. “Speed matters, but not as much as having a basic connection.”
The FCC should balance the desire to deploy fiber against the need to get Internet to people who don’t have it, agreed Robert Debroux, TDS Telecom director-federal affairs. It may be more efficient to extend existing networks than build new ones, he said. A “high fiber diet” tends to suit people better than an “all-fiber diet,” said Chuck Keller, a partner of Wilkinson Barker who represented CTIA. The auction should be designed so support goes to the provider that's most efficient at serving an area, regardless of the technology used, he said.
Satellite broadband can meet rural needs even if it’s technically inferior in some ways to fiber, said ViaSat Associate General Counsel Christopher Murphy: “We’re actually a viable alternative.” Satellite broadband will “never” have as low latency as other technologies, he acknowledged, but it can provide 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up now, he said. As satellite companies increase the capacity in orbit, speeds could compete with fiber in the 1 Gbps range, he said. The higher latency of satellite is acceptable for most applications required by consumers, he said.
But MidWest Energy CEO Bob Hance said his company was burned by satellite. Years ago, his rural energy cooperative partnered with a satellite broadband provider, but they quickly ran into capacity issues, he said. The satellite service could serve only a fraction of its customers, so MidWest dropped that provider and looked at other approaches. Two years ago, the cooperative commenced a $60 million fiber build, and other electric cooperatives around the country have similar projects, he said.
For MidWest, fiber offered the most future-proof option of the technologies available, he said. Hance doesn’t foresee having to build out yet another technology years from now, he said. “We’ve taken up this notion of build once. That's why we chose fiber over the other technologies.” Broadband providers shouldn't decide what’s good enough for customers but provide a service that enables customers to do anything they want, he said.
Fiber isn’t the only future-proof technology, but it's more expensive than others, said Keller. Wireless at 4G is often faster than 25/3 Mbps, he said. And it will get much faster with 5G, he said. Frontier supports building out fiber but envisions a phased approach that doesn’t scrap existing copper infrastructure, Saperstein said. “We can build once but not have to build all at once.”
Customers don’t care about technology; they care about service, said Murphy. "The future is actually multiple technologies providing solutions that the customers want.”