On Monday, Trump and his telecom-back-pocketed FCC shill Ajit Pai announced that they would be pushing forward $20.4 billion in government money (read, our money) for a rural broadband initiative. This is part of promoting to rural America the idea that conservatives are working to end America’s “digital divide.” The digital divide is the space between the haves and have nots in broadband and information access—a question of money that is not helped by Trump and Pai’s attempts to cut back the Lifeline program that provides subsidies to low-income households to help bridge that gap. But $20.4 billion is a lot of money, and Pai and Trump’s announcement promised up to four million new homes connected, at speeds “up to” 1 GB. That’s fast!
Pai and Trump also announced that they would be holding a spectrum auction for three new signals. A spectrum auction about which Trump’s FCC under Pai has mostly lied, lied some more, and worked, rather myopically, possibly for pennies on the telecom-dollar, to get big tax breaks and no regulations for our country’s private broadband providers.
There’s one big problem with this announcement. Nothing in this “new” program is new. In fact, it’s mostly the reworking of an already-existing program, the Connect America Fund. The spectrum auction is also something on the books from the Obama-era FCC, and according to Wall Street analyst Craig Moffet, who spoke with the website Motherboard, 5G deployment isn’t the magic bullet it’s being touted as, and some of the spectrum being auctioned would not do diddly for people in rural America.
“It’s not the first time we’ve seen the phone companies over-promise and under-deliver,” Moffett told Motherboard in an email. “5G will happen over years, or maybe even decades, so judging it in its first few weeks isn’t reasonable. But there are reasons to be skeptical about whether 5G will ever live up to the crazy hype that has been created around it.”
Aside from unresolved phone battery issues, Moffett told Motherboard that 5G requires “incredibly wide” blocks of spectrum ideally up to 800 MHz wide. The only place blocks of that size reside is in the upper reaches of millimeter wave spectrum. But that spectrum comes with its own issues, Moffett said—namely difficulties with long range signal penetration of building walls, something journalists quickly discovered when testing Verizon’s Chicago 5G launch.
This means that Pai and Trump are telling rural America that it should be excited about big telecoms bidding on contracts for sole rights to frequencies for a broadband project that will never be used in rural areas. Surprisingly, Pai and Trump didn’t give any real details on their plan. Pai’s promises of 5G via deregulation and tax incentives have not worked out at all. But considering that virtually everything and anything done in this administration is centered on giving big business more money at the expense of the rest of us … I think we know the flavor of those tweaks.
