Dems pitch $100B broadband plan | Hacker News Reader

Dems pitch $100B broadband plan

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137 pointscolawars89 comments

We already paid for nationwide broadband installation several times by now. How many more funds do we need to siphon to major corporations that still don’t build anything?

I definitely think we shouldn't give another dime in tax credits to broadband providers - a signed contract with aggressive enforcement provisions would be in order, and if the current major ISPs don't want to build the infrastructure we should find someone else who will.

vote for people who don't take funds from them. Its almost impossible.

> current major ISPs don't want to build the infrastructure we should find someone else who will.

There are no such people. Both Baltimore and Los Angeles put out bids asking for companies willing to build fiber networks on certain terms. Nobody volunteered. E.g. https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/9/16863352/free-internet-los-an...

> Los Angeles officials planned to build up a network through a public-private partnership, passing off the costs of the ambitious infrastructure project to an outside provider. Blumenfield announced last year that the city never received a workable proposal from a private company to build out the network.

why though?

There's no money in wired broadband. Investors have been trying to get Verizon to divest itself of FiOS pretty much since the beginning. It's probably profitable at this point, but barely. (Verizon's entire wireline division has a 5% or less profit margin.)

Chatanooga Tennessee charges about $60/month for 300 mbps fiber. It is probably financially sustainable, but: 1) Tennessee is a low-cost, right-to-work state; 2) the capital costs of the fiber network were shared with the electric "smart grid" so some of the capital costs are being recouped from electric ratepayers. You couldn't make the same thing work in New York, San Francisco, etc. at the $60 price point. But at a much higher price point than that, you're talking about something quite expensive for what's supposed to be a public utility. Wired broadband, unlike water or electricity, is an optional service for most people. (1 in 6 high-income households only have cellular service.) If it costs you closer to $100 to have the same service in an expensive northern city, many people will opt out, and that will cause the per-household costs to skyrocket. It's a really tough mathematical equation to work out.

thank you!

Baltimore is a basket case, so no surprise there. LA is probably too big for a single company. Normally when these tenders fail it is because the terms need to be tweaked. Probably want you really want is simply to allow individual suburbs to set up their own little broadband networks, and have the city just run some central hub. But big city beauracrats are never keen on giving up control.

I think this is odd because a lot of the major ISPs seemed to have outsourced the actual physical and electronic construction work to third parties. It's a different thing setting up the accounts and operation, but the building part seems accessible.

That depends on how many more bonuses their executives need.

Agreed. If they do pass something like this it had better include net neutrality provisions for any ISP taking the money, too.

This is simply not true. Federal money wasn't used to build broadband until Obama's second term, and that amounted to a couple of billion a year since 2012. (Of the tens of billions invested in broadband networks annually.)

> This is simply not true.

How so? (eg https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/3805..., there are lots of bills over the last decade, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, etc)

Unless you can go through each individual bill that was mandated to build infratructure, the history indicates that the OP statemnt is true. The money was pocketed and it wasn't done. Business as usual with govt contracts.

The claim that "we already paid for nationwide broadband installations several times now" is not true. The bill you linked to, for example, just says that the Secretary of Transportation "shall require States to evaluate the need for broadband conduit in accordance with this section as part of any covered highway construction project." It doesn't even appropriate any money.

The ARRA appropriate a small amount of money for rural broadband, about $2.5 billion, much of which was never even spent: https://www.benton.org/blog/questioning-federal-broadband-sp.... That was 10 years ago. Then the Connect America Fund spent less than $10 billion over the last decade. These are the only major federal programs I'm aware of that spent any significant amount of money on broadband. Over that same decade, private companies invested over $70 billion per year: https://morningconsult.com/opinions/reversal-of-fortune-broa.... I don't have a recent breakdown, but in the 2007-2008 timeframe, it was $40 billion+ per year for wireline, and $20 billion+ for wireless: http://cpham.perso.univ-pau.fr/ENSEIGNEMENT/PAU-UPPA/RHD/PAP.... It might well be the reverse today, with most of the investment in wireless, but you're still talking $20-30 billion+ per year in wireline.

So over the past decade, it's maybe $10-15 billion in government funding, targeted at a few rural areas, compared with hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment. Whether or not the government money has been properly used is a fair discussion, but a separate one. It's just a tiny fraction of what you need to build and maintain a nationwide broadband network, which is what OP was talking about.

I disagree with your initial statement. You are saying no specific bill was introduced to ensure this condition, which is a different stance.

> It doesn't even appropriate any money.

So what? The entirety of the bill might be a good reference...like

an appropriate number of broadband conduits are installed along such highway to accommodate multiple broadband providers,

> Whether or not the government money has been properly used is a fair discussion, but a separate one.

That is the core of the discussion. Reread the thread.

> We already paid for nationwide broadband installation several times by now.

If this isn't a reference to how the money has been spent, I'm not sure what you think is being argued. The downvotes are wrongheaded.

I trust your background and comments, but perhaps we're referring to different accounting here? There are grants, subsidies, tax breaks and all have been taken without the requisite buildout of infrastructure. Some sources:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150126/04502529814/what-...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200127/09334443804/look-...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200414/07290544296/fcc-s...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/isps-want-to-be-...

Thanks for collecting these sources. Let's keep in mind that ISPs were investing $40 billion+ per year of their own money in wired broadband networks during the 2000-2010 timeframe, and maybe $30 billion+ in the 2010-2020 timeframe. Conservatively, you're talking about well over half a trillion since 2000, and that’s excluding wireless.

> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad....

This is a state-level tax-break from 1994 of about $2.1 billion. There's probably a few more like this scattered around, but I don't think there are many, because the Pennsylvania one is always the one that comes up.

> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150126/04502529814/what-....

This is referring to the Pennsylvania subsidies, above.

> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200127/09334443804/look-....

This is the CAF funding I'm referring to. The article also references the Pennsylvania subsidies, and the New York FiOS rollout, which didn't involve any subsidies at all.

> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200414/07290544296/fcc-s....

This is about future subsidies.

> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/isps-want-to-be-....

Also about CAF, mentions $1.5 billion per year.

Obviously, billions of dollars of government funding that’s not delivered the desired results is a problem in its own right. I’m not well versed in rural issues so I don’t really know what the problems were there. My point simply is that the government never tried to build a “nationwide network” like OP suggested, not do these failed projects add up to even a year’s worth of the investment that would be required to actually do that.

I think it was Ars that ran an article a couple years back that showed how much money AT&T has gotten for broadband access they never completed. It was $Billions.

Wait, really?

What happened to the money? Is it not contingent on delivery of the completed product? Or was it intentionally badly written in order just to funnel money/pork to big donors?

Can you provide some citations? I'm not finding anything with a quick search.

It's a trope based on the notion that the 1996 telecom deregulation was supposed to encourage development of fiber. It's kind of like saying "we already paid for XYZ" where XYZ is whatever justification was given for the recent corporate tax cuts.

Some sources here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23646690

Going to be a little while before I have the time to sit down and go through the full text of the bill.

I see a couple of mentions of dig once requirements, no mentions of one touch make ready rules. References to municipal Internet that seem at glance to mostly be about allocating funds, but again, I haven't been able to read over the bill in detail, so I'm very likely missing details. I can't find much mentioning repeals other than what appears to be (again, just skimming) caps on the lifeline program.

For anyone who has spent more time reading, what are the big takeaways from this -- beyond just allocating money for infrastructure?

I'm pretty skeptical of a bill that just adds a few regulations around consumer costs and devotes money to building infrastructure, because what I've seen is that the big players like Comcast swoop in, take the money, and then don't build the infrastructure. And then nobody punishes them. I don't really get the point of throwing money at this problem when we've already seen that established players can just take the money and run.

What would make me excited is repeals of regulations surrounding municipal wifi, or tangible paths to stop new competitors from getting sued out of existence.

Should I be excited about anything in this bill?

> providing a $50 monthly discount on plans for low-income consumers

This only serves to support the inflated pricing of the monopolists.

I believe the FCC has to approve internet prices already, so they wouldn't be able to just arbitrarily inflate the price.

edit: Obviously I was mistaken, oops

From fcc.gov site

> Q: Does the FCC regulate the rates charged by Internet Service Providers (ISPs)?

> A: No. ISPs are considered "enhanced service providers" under FCC rules. The FCC does not regulate the rates that enhanced service providers charge to their subscribers.

Moreover, even if they could, we would need leadership at the top of FCC who would care about consumers. Right now, Mr Pai is available to dance for the highest bidder [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tribune-media-m-a-sinclai...

Like it or not, certain parts of the US are too rural/poor to justify even monopolists expanding internet service there. This will incentivize them to build in those areas.

Why doesn’t the government just build it? They do it with sewer lines, power lines, gas lines, water lines, but a little fiber is too much?

The Government does not build those.

I consider utility companies that have government oversight of pricing to be government.

Because the ISP corporations have sued the government (successfully) when it's attempted.

And 'successfully' includes a completed lawsuit and/or dragging out the proceedings so long that it costs the taxpayers too much to continue.

With few exceptions, the government doesn’t build or operate power lines in the US.

As long as the government has a hand in the pricing and product delivered, I consider it to be government (for the purposes of comparing it to a rent seeking ISP that has no oversight). If ISPs were operated and regulated like a utility like gas, electric, water, then it’s not important who owns what.

https://www.energy.gov/oe/information-center/educational-res...

Actually they often don't. In the US, we had the Rural Electrification Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act) that brought electricity into rural areas, but these places often still have wells, septic tanks, and gas tanks.

The government doesn't build water, sewer, or gas in many parts of the country! Where I live, less than an hour from DC and maybe 5 minutes from a Whole Foods, we don't have gas lines at all, we use propane and fuel oil. We got public water and sewer only in 2015, and each house is paying off a $30,000 assessment for that. Most of the areas around us are reliant on wells and septic systems. Ironically, we have had fiber since 2008 or so. As to electric--most of that was built back when labor was relatively very cheap and tons of people were unemployed. We couldn't build the national electric grid today, for the same reason we couldn't build the New York subway today.

Then use roads as an example. The point is, internet is obviously a communal good that can’t be logistically provided by more than one entity, and the government is there for the benefit of the community.

ISPs will sue saying the government should not compete with business.

I don't get why we want to build stuff in rural areas. From a cost perspective, we have to subsidize the infrastructure including medical and utilities. From economic standpoint, the jobs are in the cities. Labor participation rates in cities is much higher than rural areas. Investing in housing cost reductions in urban areas seems like a better investment than wiring rural areas with high speed internet.

Because they're people too, and it winds up being profitable for everyone.

It took New Deal politicians dragging the electric companies kicking and screaming to get rural eras electrified, because the companies didn't think there'd be enough usage to justify the wiring. Turns out, once it's available, people use it, and it was profitable.

Not all the jobs are in the cities. I'd imagine rural areas have a lot of large-scale farming that would be expensive to do in the city.

Tons of people also grow up in rural areas; access to high speed internet would probably be useful for their development and maybe even innovation in these areas.

Personally I see high speed internet as a way to integrate people who may not be geographically close to each other; this includes those living in rural areas.

"Jobs are in the cities"

Yeah, except for agriculture, energy production, mining, large manufacturing, warehousing and other critical industries that city dwellers like to forget exist. All of these require people, and those people need to live somewhere near their place of work.

There's not a lot of them and as a percentage of total jobs, it is declining every year. Projects should be determined by ROI and be forward looking. Focusing on urban areas where it we get bigger multiplier on our economy and is forwarding looking as that is where the jobs are being created. We have lots of people in rural areas with no jobs and we have urban areas which have labor shortages.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/emp...

You could say the same thing about any government subsidy. Why subsidize the poor when the wealthy generate most of the tax revenue, why should single people subsidize children, etc.

There's poor people in cities as well. This is more like should be invest in fossil fuels vs green energy. Cities is where the job growth is at. Propping up rural would be like propping up the coal industry.

Are jobs in the cities anymore? Jobs downtown in an expensive office building for information workers to basically do the same work they're doing at home right now seems like an artificial and outdated constraint.

Why are we propping up concentrated urban cores with their congestion, pollution, expense/inflation?

If jobs were in vacuums, I'd agree.

More importantly, lives are not in a vacuum and might have physical constraints. Perhaps I want to live in a city (congestion, pollution that comes with it) because the lifestyle and culture I prefer blossoms in a more urban area.

I think you could still develop that culture within town centers and density wouldn't necessarily go away completely, but ideally you could find most of what you need in your neighborhood, ideally by just walking.

A dense urban core that is too expensive to live in, and requires a long commute, is not healthy or within a lot of people's lifestyle goals.

We already have incentivized them. They take the money, promise to build, and then just don't. They know that neither the FCC nor any of the state/local governments have any will right now to punish them for not following through on their commitments.

At this point, it would be more efficient to just give the money to municipalities directly and just tell them to build their own infrastructure.

Government incentives for commercial companies aren't always bad, but in this case I think they're really clearly not working, and we're just shoveling more money into that hole.

I don't know why these sort of things don't work on a reimbursement basis. Instead of just handing over a huge chunk of money, why shouldn't telecoms be required to submit invoices for reimbursement on qualifying work? It would ensure taxpayers were only paying for work actually completed, not empty promises.

Aren't these the customers that SpaceX is targeting with Starlink? Ones that live so far apart that laying fiber is really expensive, but also don't have too many other people living in their satellite footprint?

But they won't. We've already done that before.

I’m very naive when it comes to these sorts of things. What would we do to help out? Would it be “we’ll fund up to 50$, but the charge is capped to 75$”?

It seems like once you’re going to distort the market, pricing becomes difficult? What about: if there’s 4 serious competitors, then we’ll give you a 50$ subsidy, otherwise, we’ll tell the providers the minimum plan, and that minimum is free to a chunk of the population? Or, do you get municipalities to roll out municipal internet?

Yep, this solves nothing. The ISPs will continue lining the politicians' pockets and we will keep over-paying for it. I wish Google fiber hadn't hit so many road blocks and took off nationally - it would have set a higher bar for quality vs price. I'm lucky enough to have a decent month-to-month internet plan under $40 with 200mbps, but I realize the majority of America is still being stiffed hard by Comcast/AT&T/CenturyLink/Cox/Verizon, especially households in rural areas.

Exactly. Offering to "help pay" for housing, education or whatever, is how prices rise stratospherically.

Why do we have to throw $100B at everything? Just repeal the state limits on Municipal networks and let it ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel

Didnt they try this before and ISPs just ate the money and didnt finish laying cables?

Did they start?

They did enough for some election campaign photo ops.

Love the repeal of muni network limitations. That is just straight corruption - I’ve never heard a coherent explanation for why states should be able to prevent that.

It would be absurd, absolutely absurd to give even more money to ISPs. $100b is so much money which could be better spent on transportation infrastructure rather than a handout to some of the worst corporate citizens in the US

Just to give you another perspective (although to be fair we are a much smaller country) here in Spain the Government each year has a program called PEBANG (New Generation Broadband Extension Program), which essentially subsidizes the deployment of fiber (FTTH). The ISPs submit proposals to cover a set of so-called "white zones" and then the Government subsidizes up to 80% of the cost (up to a limit, of course).

This program, along with the fact that Telefonica, the incumbent operator, decided years ago to concentrate its efforts on deploying FTTH (all that's really left right now is to complete rural areas), and having an incentive of doing copper switch-off, means that each year there are more and more villages (even really small ones of, say, 10 people) covered by fiber. Telefonica hopes to have 100% FTTH coverage by 2024 (right now we're on 80%).

Orange is also another operator which also deployed lots of fiber both by itself and through this program for rural areas.

The competitive telecom market in Spain and also the regulations appear to have also been a factor in this transformation.

They also said they'd have turned off the entire pots network (including ADSL) by 2020 and here we are.

I prefer Sanders’ proposal https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/

Sanders' proposals in general have no chance of actually passing in Congress, so I'll trust the Dems' one.

No democratic plans are going to get to the floor of the Senate, so you might as well put forward the one you actually want.

This plan probably won't amount to more than a corporate hand out. Much rather have Bernie's plan.

TLDR:

• Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.

• Require that all internet service providers offer a Basic Internet Plan that provides quality broadband speeds at an affordable price.

• Break up internet service provider and cable monopolies, bar service providers from providing content, and unwind anticompetitive mergers.

• Ensure broadband infrastructure is resilient to the effects of climate change.

> • Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.

Limit it to eminent domain on the poles for rural/suburban municipalities. Costly, but keeps the rent seekers off the physical medium. For populations over X density, use the money to drop fiber underground, again that the municipality owns.

Issue licenses to companies that want to play ball with the towns and cities, or give the people the option to have the town run it. Spectrum/poles/underground should be public resources. Fine and/or revoke licenses from companies that are running scams and failing to reach this commitment.

States have flexed before to compel companies to meet build-out requirements: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691853/charter-spectrum...

Spectrum squatters are a real problem for smaller WISP's. DISH is likely the largest mid-band squatter on the market right now, having built a single test tower with their AWS-4 spectrum license. It was supposed to cover 70% of the population by March 2020 and they blew it off for 3 years or so and are requesting another 3. https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/licenseAdminSum.j...

Better a good plan that doesn't pass than a bad plan that makes the (corporate takeover) problem worse.

Hint to Dems: GET CAUGHT TRYING.

It feels like people don't realize how broke the US is right now. We're going to be in a recession, we're going to have massive unemployment bills, we already spent a ridiculous amount of money this year...

Tax revenue is going to be way down.

We can't afford these things; if the internet is too slow, you can either pay more for it or you can move somewhere where it is better.

We can’t afford anything but trillions in borrowed money show up year after year anyways.

Countries that print their own currency and issue debt in their own currency find it very hard to go broke.

Countries that own the major global currency needed for trade are even less likely to go broke.

Infrastructure spending should have one of the best returns on investment that government spending can. It generates economic activity during the build phase, and continues to deliver a return after completion.

"Just move" isn't a reasonable alternative. Many people in rural areas can't afford to live anywhere else - having access to decent internet might help change that.

Is it worth it? Its always amazing to me the correlation between fiber and tech success. Eg SV doesn't have much fiber and lots of fiber rich cities and countries dont have much tech. Seems the best use for fiber is video streaming which isn't really that useful. I have 1 gig fiber and dont really notice the difference from 5/150 cable unless I'm uploading backups.

The missing X% without high speed internet available to them are primarily rural. Space's Starlink is poised to offer high speed internet to those exact people on a timeline faster than whatever this project dreams it can achieve, at zero (additional) cost to the government.

The other chunk of society without access to high speed internet are the low income. So why not just spend $50B on welfare reform (or even Basic Income) to provide the financial means needed to access the existing high speed internet. They can buy internet, or something they need more. You'd save $50B.

All together, this just seems like a new way to funnel $100B of tax money into the pockets of corporations who make the right political donations.

How feasible would it be for a city to build publicly available wireless access points so that anybody who wanted to run a WISP can do so? I'd really like the option to walk away from a commercial ISP entirely if it's too painful. Right now I just cancel my Internet for a few months and go to the library before calling Comcast again, but with the current and possible future pandemics that might not be a viable option.

https://startyourownisp.com/

Many states have laws that prevent cities from entering the ISP market.

https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Instead of all this, pass a law giving safe harbor to municipal broadband - give legal protection to municipal governments that want to pursue this.

Also require that affordances such as utility poles, rights of way, etc, be made available for expanding broadband.

In many cases, municipal governments are prohibited from creating or operating broadband infrastructure.

Wait! We've seen this before. It happens right before elections to promise companies a fat payday from the companies, and then they gouge customers for under performing bandwidth!

How about we just buy service from Starlink, on a per-connection basis, rather then paying for their infrastructure?

Oh man municipal fiber if successful is likely the only thing that can challenge the big telcos

Wouldn't it be cheaper to get reliable 4G/5G coverage to currently undeserved places ?

Look at the Obamacare handout to healthcare tech companies to get an idea of how little progress is made when government is the benefactor. It's tragic how poorly they will spend $100 Billion.

How about just let Google Fiber do its thing?

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