The rules would ban the practice of marketers purporting to have written consent for numerous parties to contact a consumer.
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WASHINGTON, June 6, 2023 – Commenters claim that the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules that would require mobile wireless providers to ban marketers from contacting a consumer multiple times based on one consent will harm legitimate communications. 
The new rules will set additional protections that would require the terminating provider to block texts after notification from the FCC that the text is illegal, to extend the National Do-Not-Call Registry’s protections to text messages, and to ban the practice of marketers purporting to have written consent for numerous parties to contact a consumer based on one consent. Comments on the proposal were due in May and reply comments on June 6.
“Robocall campaigns often rely on flimsy claims of consent where a consumer interested in job listings, a potential reward, or a mortgage quote, unknowingly and unwillingly ‘consents’ to telemarketing calls from dozens – or hundreds or thousands – of unaffiliated entities about anything and everything,” read the comments from USTelecom trade association.  
Wireless trade association CTIA cited that Medicaid text messages that alert customers to critical health updates may be blocked by the ruling despite the FCC’s acknowledgement that these texts are critical. Many providers are unbending in enforcing robotext policies that mandate agencies must “satisfactorily demonstrate they receive prior express consent from enrollees to contact them.” 
CTIA’s comments claimed that the proposed rules would “do little to enhance existing industry efforts to reduce text spam or protect consumers.” 
Competitive networks trade association INCOMPAS claimed that the current framework is not well suited to allow the industry to universally resolve text messaging issues. “In the absence of standardized, competitively neutral rules, the current dynamics create perverse incentives that allow gamesmanship and arbitrage schemes as well as fraudulent behaviors to thrive.” 
USTelecom commended the FCC for taking these steps and suggested that it expressly ban the practice of obtaining single consumer consent as grounds for delivering calls to multiple receivers by issuing a decisive declaration rather than a rule change. Providing clear guidance will deprive aggressive telemarketers of the plausible deniability they rely on to put calls through, it said. 
The new language proposed in the notice is unnecessary and runs the risk of introducing new ambiguity by not eliminating perceived loopholes through a decisive declaration, read its comments. 
The Retail Industry Leaders Association claimed that the notice would “primarily and negatively impact those who send legitimate text message solicitations, not scam senders and bad actors.” The well-intentioned measures will sweep in legitimate text communications, it claimed, by reducing consumer control and making assumptions on their behalf. 
“Consumers use the DNC list to prevent unwanted telephone call solicitations. They do not expect that the DNC List will prevent normal and desired communications from legitimate businesses like RILA members,” it wrote.
In the event the FCC moves forward with the proposed rules, the RILA urged that the rules include “clear carve-outs or safe harbors” for legitimate solicitations. 
This comes as the FCC considers additional proposed rules that will strengthen consumer consent for robocalls and robotexts by allowing consumers to decide which robocalls and texts they wish to receive.
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Proposed Rules to Limit Unwanted Calls Will Not Protect Consumers, Says CTIA
Contributing Reporter Teralyn Whipple, who joined Broadband Breakfast in 2022, studied marketing at Brigham Young University. She has reported extensively on broadband infrastructure, investments and deployment. She has also headed marketing campaigns for several small companies.
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Of $10 billion spent through 2021, 93 percent of households received only 10 * 1 Mbps service.
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WASHINGTON, November 9, 2023 – In the months Before President Joe Biden signed into law the historic infrastructure law on November 15, 2021, Republicans and Democrats wrangled over how much to spend on broadband.
Democratic lawmakers sought $100 billion, while their Republican counterparts countered with $65 billion, saying the former’s proposal was wasteful and excessive. The final score was $65 billion, with $42.5 billion of that earmarked for infrastructure in the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, or BEAD.
Crucially, the BEAD program adopted a new definition of what adequate broadband would look like: 100 Megabits per second download and 20 Megabits per second upload.
It turns out, that speed threshold is serving as a key reason why money from BEAD and other programs will be used to cover already-subsidized projects under an older Federal Communications Commission program that has only recently completed some broadband builds using older technology.
Broadband Breakfast has analyzed the data and spoke with experts and former FCC officials about the pitfalls and problems with the Connect America Fund Phase II, or CAF II, a $10 billion funding program that started in 2014.
FCC officials working on the program said they knew the 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps requirement was low and would lead to further subsidization down the road.
But they went ahead with it because they needed a political win after the low adoption of the program’s predecessor: Connect America Fund I.
The problems started just six weeks after the CAF II program was finalized, when the FCC in 2015 approved a new definition of adequate broadband: an internet connection of at least 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps download.
Critically, it didn’t migrate the CAF II threshold over to the new definition out of fear it would disincentivize interest in the program.
“In retrospect I can say it was a mistake having 10 * 1 Mbps be the standard for CAF Phase II,” said Carol Mattey, a former FCC bureau chief who worked on the plan.
The program offered large telecommunications companies, called price cap carriers, annual funding in exchange for providing that 10 * 1 Mbps service to rural areas across the U.S. without access to faster connections.
The FCC was desperate for providers to get on the program. It realized that it had many more years to formulate a reverse auction process, which would be used under the program’s successor, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, and so it was trying to entice providers to accept money by keeping the speed threshold low.
Instead of waiting to formulate the reverse auction, which involves the providers bidding for the lowest amount of public dollars, they wanted to show that they were committed to connectivity – even when they knew that the speeds were low.
“It was scandalous, what the commission did,” said Jonathan Chambers, the FCC’s policy head during CAF II’s implementation. “It was graft.”
Chambers said he and the economists in his office were opposed to subsidizing price cap carriers at 10 * 1 Mbps from the beginning. He saw it as a giveaway to a powerful industry with too few strings attached.
In 2012 and 2013, the FCC offered price gap carriers a baseline of $750 per location to expand internet at the then-minimum broadband speed of 4 * 1 Mbps under CAF I. Five companies, including AT&T, Lumen, and Frontier, accepted a total of $225 million.
That didn’t feel like much to agency staffers who spent years updating the High-Cost Fund, which had provided companies subsidies with much fewer obligations than CAF I.
“Basically nobody took it,” Mattey said. “At the time, it felt like a failure. We’d gone through all this trouble to reform universal service and nobody wanted the money.”
All that amounted to a situation in which FCC staff felt they needed a success after the lackluster CAF I, according to Mattey. With a competitive bidding procedure known as a “reverse auction” still years away, that meant getting big telecom companies to work with the agency on another round of funding.
Those companies had already pushed back on raising the minimum speed from 4 * 1 Mbps to 10 * 1 Mbps, and setting an even higher benchmark would have risked another round of refused money.
“There was a desire to make this a success,” she said. “Better to take an incremental success than to be bold and have an absolute failure.”
CAF II and CAF I were always intended to be a stepping stone, she said. It would serve as a stopgap measure to get people connected while the agency worked out the process for an auction, in which companies would compete for subsidies with plans for building and maintaining new infrastructure.
But the FCC had never administered a reverse auction for broadband subsidies before, and creating one took time. The CAF II auction, in which areas the price cap carriers turned down were put up for auction, took a total of seven years to put together and was not ready until 2018.
Carol Mattey
Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman at the time, declined to talk about the negotiations among commissioners and telecom companies. But he told Broadband Breakfast he felt the pressure Mattey described.
He confirmed that the 10 * 1 Mbps benchmark was set as low as it was out of fear the price cap carriers would refuse the money if it meant a more substantial upgrade.
The low benchmark worked. Ten companies accepted a total of more than $1.5 billion each year for the next six years in exchange for getting 10 * 1 Mbps service to more than 3.6 million homes and businesses. They would ultimately build to slightly more locations and get a seventh year of funding at the same amount, for a total of more than $10 billion.
But the tradeoff was ultimately not worth it for Mattey. Upping the standard to 25 * 3 Mbps and letting areas turned down by price cap carriers go to auction would have served them better than funding such low speeds, she said.
Michael O’Rielly, a commissioner at the time, concurred with CAF II’s adoption. He said in public statements at the time that he had reservations about the program’s speed benchmark. But he told Broadband Breakfast that in hindsight he feels the low speeds were better than nothing for unserved areas.
“I’ve seen those that have nothing and can’t get connected,” he said. “If you can give them 10 * 1 they can actually do something with it, even if it’s not everything you can do with 100 * 20.”
Michael O’Rielly
The three biggest winners at the time were Lumen, AT&T, and Frontier Communications. Lumen led the pack with a $514 million annual award, while AT&T and Frontier were given $428 million and $283 million, respectively. Windstream received almost $200 million.
The price cap carriers were supposed to get money each year until 2020, when they were required to have finished deploying upgraded infrastructure in their respective areas. Citing pandemic supply chain issues, they took another year. That meant builds finished as late as 2021 were providing 10 * 1 Mbps service – a technological standard deemed by BEAD to be obsolete.
Companies followed the minimum standard set out in the program. FCC data, reported to the agency by those companies, show more than 93 percent of all locations served with CAF II infrastructure received only 10 * 1 Mbps service.
And that took place after the commission had declared 10 * 1 Mbps as substandard. That 93 percent of locations represents about 3.7 million homes and businesses across the country that are now limited to no more than 10 * 1 Mbps internet service.
Most of those, more than 2.9 million, did not receive service on their internet connections until 2019 or later.
That 10 * 1 Mbps threshold was too low for the program to meaningfully connect people, said former FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. He left the commission in 2009 to head the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service, an infrastructure funding agency that supports broadband deployment.
“Well, 10 * 1 was our standard in 2010,” he said. “For people to be building that in 2020 is really inadequate.”
Some of those have already been targeted with more federal money. In 2020, the FCC put areas with internet below 25 * 3 Mbps, including those served by CAF II recipients, up for a reverse auction process, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. Under RDOF, companies competed for subsidies with plans to cost-effectively build and maintain new infrastructure.
Winners have been allocated more than $6 billion to build and operate networks over the next 10 years under the RDOF program, according to the FCC, with another $14 billion still earmarked for the program. The minimum speed threshold for the auction was 25 * 3 Mbps, but the fiber being deployed by winners almost always provides speeds far in excess of that.
As part of RDOF, the price cap carriers lost 1.2 million homes and businesses to outside bidders, about a third of their previously subsidized locations. Competitors demonstrated to the FCC they would be able to get better internet for less money to the same areas price caps had been receiving money to serve.
Almost every single winning bidder committed to deploy fiber-optic cable: The fastest, most future-proof technology available.
Lumen, the biggest CAF II recipient, lost more than 250,000 locations through the RDOF process. It beat out competitors for just 19,000 locations.
Frontier lost another 285,000 homes and businesses, beating competitors in more than 10,000.
AT&T lost more than half a million locations in the RDOF auction, winning zero locations.
Those losses came largely at the hands of smaller companies and local cooperatives. Charter, the major cable company, also scooped up locations across the county.
Jonathan Chambers
CAF II did make some positive changes to broadband subsidies generally, Mattey said. There were no requirements at all for funding recipients before the program, which instituted speed minimums and reporting requirements.
Mattey and others also drew up a process for determining exactly where subsidized companies were operating, which again did not exist before. And then there was the smaller CAF II Auction, which happened in the areas where price cap carriers turned down CAF II funding.
The auction happened in 2018 and got faster service for less money. A total of 100 bidders won $1.49 billion over 10 years to serve more than 700,000 locations. The minimum required speed was still 10 * 1 Mbps, but more than half the winning bidders committed to serve customers with 100 Mbps download, and more than 99 percent committed to 25 * 3 Mbps.
BEAD, the latest round of broadband subsidy, requires minimum speeds of 100 * 20 Mbps and prioritizes fiber. Areas receiving less than 25 * 3 Mbps are designated “unserved” and given special priority for funding. States are not allowed to allocate BEAD money elsewhere until all unserved areas are set to be provided with high-capacity broadband.
FCC data still shows more than 800,000 CAF II-funded locations still have no reliable, fast internet infrastructure nearby, and are not among the 1.2 million with RDOF commitments. That puts them at the front of the line for BEAD funds. It’s not clear whether the remaining 1.6 million homes and business in the proximity of faster technology are themselves being served with that speed, meaning they may well also be slated for more federal funds.
“RDOF and BEAD are wholly replacing these networks,” Chambers said. “The FCC spent more than $10 billion, and what did we get for it? Nothing.”
The FCC’s proposal would allow schools and libraries to request E-Rate funding to support remote connectivity.
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WASHINGTON November 8, 2023 – The Federal Communications Commission announced Wednesday a proposal to allow schools and libraries to submit applications for funding through the E-Rate program to subsidize internet services needed for remote learning. 
The E-Rate program, currently administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company with guidance from the FCC, provides monthly discounts on internet services to schools and libraries. 
The proposed update to the program would now allow applicants to request funding to support Wi-Fi hotspots and internet services to be used off of school campuses to improve the experience of remote learning while supporting other online school resources like virtual library services. 
Previous changes to the E-Rate Program have been opposed by lawmakers, such as when FCC Chariwoman Jessica Rosenworcel put forth a “Learn Without Limits” initiative in June of this year which aimed to get Wi-Fi onto school buses. 
The announcement Wednesday also highlighted the fact that the Emergency Connectivity Fund, a $7.1 billion program aimed at supporting schools to develop digital learning environments, is set to phase out in June of 2024. 
“During the pandemic we saw the power of community-driven efforts to help close the digital divide. Many schools and libraries found ways to support internet access by loaning out Wi-Fi hotspots. Some used this agency’s Emergency Connectivity Fund to do so,” said Rosenworcel.  
She echoed that while the ECF made a great impact it is time to move toward a more permanent solution to support digital connectivity in schools. 
The FCC’s new E-Rate proposal is now subject to comment from the public.  
The commission would increase its standard to 100 * 20 Mbps.
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WASHINGTON, November 2, 2023 – The Federal Communications Commission is looking to increase its definition of broadband internet speed, the agency announced on Wednesday.
The current definition, set in 2015, requires speeds of 25 megabits per second – Mbps – download and 1 Mbps upload for internet service to be considered broadband, or simply high-speed internet. The agency is seeking comment on increasing that to 100 * 20 Mbps, it said in a notice of inquiry.
“During the pandemic and even before it, the needs of internet users surpassed the FCC’s 25/3 standard for broadband. This standard is not only outdated, it masks the extent to which low- income neighborhoods and rural communities are being left offline and left behind,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a press release.
The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, a $42.5 billion broadband expansion effort set off with the 2021 Infrastructure Act, already has a benchmark of 100 * 20 Mbps. Areas with access to speeds lower than this will be eligible to get broadband upgrades with BEAD-funded infrastructure, and those with access to anything less than 25 * 3 Mbps are given special priority.
The FCC will also take comments on setting a significantly higher long-term goal: 1 Gbps * 500 Mbps. 
In addition to revamping the commission’s speed benchmarks, the inquiry will also look to evaluate the state of broadband availability in the U.S., looking at broadband deployment, affordability, adoption, and equitable access. The commission is required to do this annually by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
It will be the first of these evaluations, the NOI notes, to use the commission’s Broadband Data Collection data. Part of the 2020 Broadband DATA Act, the BDC database has more precise information on broadband availability in the U.S., and the commission is seeking comment on how best to refresh its standards and frameworks in light of the better data.
Comments are due by December 1, with reply comments due December 18.



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