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R47506 — The Persistent Digital Divide: Selected Broadband Deployment Issues and Policy Considerations

Reports · published 2023-04-18 · v2 · Active · crsreports.congress.gov ↗

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Authors
Colby Leigh Rachfal
Report id
R47506
Summary

Access to high-speed internet—known as broadband—has become a topic of increasing significance over the past few decades, with extra urgency in recent years due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Deployment of broadband is not uniform across the United States. Some areas lack broadband entirely—creating a so-called digital divide between those who have access to broadband service and those who do not. Although some public entities (e.g., municipalities) provide broadband service, broadband is primarily deployed by the private sector. Private sector providers typically make their deployment decisions based on economic criteria, such as whether an area will provide a sufficient return on investment. They may therefore choose not to serve communities that have a lower population density (i.e., rural or remote areas) if they conclude that the cost to provide service would outweigh the returns. The terrain in some rural or remote areas may also make some technologies—such as fiber optic cable—more expensive to deploy. In such cases, it may not make economic sense for providers to deploy broadband in the absence of some type of subsidy to offset their costs. Federal support for broadband deployment comes primarily from three agencies—the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (an agency in the Department of Commerce). Other federal agencies have programs that fund broadband deployment as one among many possible activities, but in most cases broadband is not the primary eligible funding activity. The federal government has been providing support for broadband deployment for decades; progress has been made, but the digital divide persists. To deploy federal resources effectively, an accurate national picture of where broadband is and is not available is key. The FCC has responsibility for mapping broadband availability, but ensuring the accuracy of the data has been challenging, and the federal government does not know precisely where broadband has and has not been deployed. Another issue is that broadband takes time to deploy, especially if there are supply chain problems, labor shortages, or delays in administration of federal funding. The digital divide puzzle is complex and has many pieces. Additional funding for broadband deployment may not alone be enough to close it. The 118th Congress may also assess whether regulatory policies are helping or hindering broadband deployment and weigh how changes in regulatory policies could help. Possible considerations include the sufficiency of federal broadband funding and whether more is needed, the numerous federal agencies and programs involved in promoting broadband deployment, which could lead to coordination issues or duplication of effort, the FCC’s minimum broadband speed benchmark and whether raising the speed benchmark could inadvertently create a new digital divide, the potential for prioritization of unserved areas to ensure ubiquitous broadband availability, and the potential application of rural electrification strategies to rural broadband deployment. Policy options proposed in bills currently under consideration by the 118th Congress include, for example, prioritizing the processing of applications for rural broadband projects located in areas with the shortest construction seasons (H.R. 43), amending the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude certain broadband grants from gross income (H.R. 889/S. 341), determining whether the lack of network equipment significantly impacted the deployment of broadband (S. 690), and ensuring that broadband maps are accurate before funds are allocated under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (S. 1162).

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