There’s been controversy about whether it’s a good idea to subsidize Internet connectivity for disenfranchised Americans, but President Obama made the White House’s stance clear in July when he announced the ConnectHome program to bring affordable broadband access to rural communities and public housing. Now four senators are raising doubts, though, about the quality of the Internet that these types of programs provide.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture runs the Community Connect Grants program and other programs to bring broadband to the rural U.S., but Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Angus King, I-Maine; and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., wrote a critical letter to the agency last week.*
Spotted by Ars Technica, the letter particularly calls out the download and upload speed standards defined by Community Connect. There isn’t one central definition of “broadband,” but the Federal Communications Commission started defining broadband as 25Mbps download speed and 3Mbps upload speed in January 2015. Community Connect offers 4Mbps download as broadband (this number matched the FCC’s definition of broadband before 2015), while USDA’s Rural Broadband Access Loan program just upgraded its “broadband” to 10Mbps download.*
Given the demands of Web browsing in 2016—videos, multimedia-rich websites, etc.—4Mbps down is dicey for one person, much less a family. The senators wrote in their letter:
Federal policymakers must ensure that taxpayer-supported infrastructure is sufficiently robust to handle demand. It is not only a matter of fairness that rural Americans can fully utilize broadband-enabled resources, but also a matter of ensuring that taxpayers are receiving the full economic development return on their investments.
By contrast, Comcast Internet Essentials offered 5Mbps down in 2014 and now seems to offer 10Mbps. The FCC also offers a program called Lifeline that provides 10Mbps down for low-income Americans. Though these options don’t exactly offer blazing fast speeds either, 10 is definitely better than 4.
Part of the problem is that internet service providers resist increasing the threshold for calling something “broadband” so they can report higher proliferation numbers. Additionally, most government internet subsidies allocate $9.25 per household for broadband, which doesn’t leave a big cushion for increasing speeds. Still, the senators make a good point. If taxpayers are investing in these subsidies, recipients should at least get adequate connectivity out of them.
Correction, May 11, 2016: This post originally misstated that the ConnectHome broadband subsidy program is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in collaboration with the White House. USDA runs the Community Connect Grants program.
