Letter to the Editor: Now is not time to deploy broadband internet on cheap

According to Albert Einstein, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Congress is taking this to a whole new level with its latest discussions about how to “fix” broadband internet deployment across the United States.

This is my 10^th year as a broadband advocate.  Seven of those years have been as state representative for Missouri’s 5^th House District.  I was working on this issue as a grassroots advocate three years before being elected to office.  Why?  Because my corner of the state was blessed with eight of the 10 worst served counties in Missouri.  Why was that the case? Because with a few exceptions, major league internet providers did not care whether we lived or died in Northeast Missouri.  

Remember those days when states were at the mercy of internet providers who treated us like colonies, extracting wealth and giving precious little in return?  I do. Everyone then knew that lack of internet access was hamstringing economic development and online education, and the federal government, to its credit, decided to do something about it.

Unfortunately, what they did was flat wrong.

Instead of investing heavily in promising new technologies, it threw billions at the lowest cost alternative.  Instead of methodically reviewing the areas where high-speed internet would need to go, they took the easy way out and declared through “census block methodology” that where one person out of 1,000 had high-speed internet, everyone did.  They knew that was hogwash but kept on throwing good money after bad. Instead of evaluating bids thoroughly, they applied the “reverse auction” process to a service that has become an utter necessity in the 21^st-century economy.  Reverse auctions make perfect sense when you are buying paper towels and toilet paper in quantity for government office buildings, but not for delivery of something as complicated as deploying high-speed internet.  

The net result of these efforts across the United States is an unholy mess that guaranteed the people who most desperately needed high-speed internet in rural and urban America were not going to get it.  Billions of dollars worth of bids were so low that it was physically impossible to deploy even agonizingly slow fixed wireless internet in the areas that they “won.”  

Fly-by-night and downright mercenary internet outfits bid so low to pump up market share, so responsible providers refused to even bid. Your average small town city council would have thrown those bids out as impossible to fulfill, but not the Federal government. They doubled down round after round, compounding their errors. Add to that “maps” that were “supplied” by providers who were loathe to disclose where all of their served addresses were located, and you have a perfect storm of god-awful failures across the United States. 

Then something truly horrific happened — a global pandemic. COVID disrupted the way our very society functioned. People who had gone to the office for decades stayed home. College classes that once met in person went “remote.”  Those who were sick, but not with COVID, scrambled to find a way to avoid exposure to COVID and tried to access what had been up to that point a novelty — telemedicine.

What we found all over the United States was that we did not have enough broadband internet to make any of those functions work on a sustainable basis.

People who had used the internet to download video games and binge watch Netflix now had to depend on the internet to upload important, lengthy documents.  Literally everything changed in a matter of weeks — and then we sent the students home from school.  That was when all hell broke loose.

Businesses who paid through the nose for the highest speed internet suddenly sat at their computers watching the “spinning circle of death” as their computers failed push out emails, take payments or keep their home pages operating.  Because I was “the broadband guy,” I started getting phone calls about this and asked folks in state government what was going on.  The answer: From the peak business hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., 40 to 45 percent of all the bandwidth in the state was being soaked up by Netflix and YouTube. 

No one saw that coming. 

The federal government swung into action, first with the CARES program, which was put together in a hurry and was a mess. Then came the ARPA program, which showed that the federal government could actually get it right when they listened to everyone who complained at the top of their lungs about CARES.

What was at the top of everyone’s list? Broadband internet.

ARPA was federalism at its best. The federal government left the heavy lifting of broadband implementation up to the states, sending huge sums of money to the states along the lines of block grants.  Where CARES had come down like a sledgehammer, ARPA landed like a feather. 

States swung into action, standing up broadband offices and funds where none existed weeks earlier. We are now well over $2.2 billion into broadband deployment funding in Missouri.  When we began 2020, we were at zero. By the end of 2020, which included the General Assembly leaving the capitol for more than a month and then coming back and passing significant broadband legislation that saw three “no” votes out of more than 190 members, we were well on our way to solving the problems that had plagued us for a decade.

We crafted a broadband grant process that was fair, transparent and comprehensive. In 2020 and again in 2022, we passed common sense “guardrail” language to make sure our broadband funds would reach the people it was supposed to.  We equipped every political subdivision in the state to erect “vertical real estate” (towers and antennae) to help increase the reach of fixed wireless assets. We enacted stringent claw-back and snap site inspection language to make sure broadband providers using taxpayer dollars stayed on time and on task. COVID sharpened our focus, prompting us to act immediately while ensuring responsibility, and the federal government stayed out of our way.

So far, so good. 

Then the feds decided to make a once-in-a-lifetime investment in America — BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment), a $42.5 billion program designed to close the digital divide once and for all.  

The most vociferous criticisms of BEAD have centered on how long it has taken to deploy.  On its face, that is a fair criticism. Contextualized, however, the criticism does not hold water.  No one is asking why it took so long. 

The simple answer:  Maps.  

The FCC released a series of maps over the years that were deficient at best.  They depended on providers to fill in the gaps. The maps were clunky to use and, because they used census block methodology, were woefully inaccurate.  At one of my interim broadband committee hearings in 2021, we showed an FCC map for a committee member’s area of the state which was basically all green — “covered.” 

He was so upset at that depiction that he jumped up, went to the video screen, pointed at the map and yelled, “That’s a lie!” 

His anger was well placed. States had to get into the mapmaking business because the federal government had not bothered. After a decade of pushing billions out to providers with precious little oversight and no appreciable urgency to “get it right,” the states had to reinvent the wheel to make sure statutes like ours that mandated stewardship were obeyed. 

To ensure that the maps were accurate, we opened the maps up to a “challenge” process where people who knew good and well that they were not covered had the opportunity to “poke holes” in the old maps and provide us, for the first time, with accurate depictions of reality.  We also rejected the deeply flawed “census block” process in favor of the eminently sensible “community standard.” 

This takes time, by the way. Lots of it.  Because the funds were unprecedented — Missouri is in line for $1.7 billion, the third most in the United States and the most per capita — we released multiple maps to make double sure that the funds would go to the people who needed it the most — “Worst First.”  In other words, we were finally doing what the feds were supposed to be doing all the way along and abjectly failed to do.  

To the critics of the lengthy BEAD process, I have one thing to say: You cannot use federal incompetence as both a sword and shield. The states are in this boat due to lack of federal foresight, faulty implementation and next to zero oversight over the last decade and more. 

It gets worse.

The latest “brainstorm” in Congress is to start capping how much funding can be allocated to a particular site. This is a back-handed and rather clumsy way of trashing fiber, the consensus choice for best delivery of high-speed internet, and giving the inside track to satellite technology.  

I have really bad news for Congress. No reputable provider with more than one brain cell to rub together is going to propose serving areas that do not make sense with fiber.  No state broadband office populated by intelligent life is going to sign off on fiber proposals that do not make sense. 

There is a reason for that. We are states, and we are a lot closer to the problem we are solving than the hidebound “learn nothing, forget nothing” bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who are bound and determined to turn BEAD into a nationwide production of “Groundhog Day.”  

Even worse is that with the dawn of AI, what we are now calling “The Need for Speed” is more acute than ever. We have already seen a geometric progression in speed over the last decade — remember when 10:1 was all the rage? My providers are telling me that 100/100, now the preferred but not mandated federal minimum speed, will be obsolete in the next three to five years. We will zoom past 500/500 to a gig in the process.  

What else is coming at us in real time? The proliferation of data centers, which are leading to something we are now calling “power poverty.” While the media has been focused on the lack of power in the national grid to ensure that electric vehicles can make it from one end of the country to the other, the skyrocketing demands of AI computational requirements and data center power needs have landed upon us in full force. When Microsoft is moving to recommission a dormant nuclear power plant to power up its AI needs, we have a serious problem as a nation.  

What does the “Need for Speed” mean for those who are limping along on $30 monthly data plans or tethered to satellite internet? The least of your worries is latency issues. The biggest worry is that the revolution in AI will leave you completely behind — just like the people I talk to today in areas of my state who have no broadband, cannot work from home, cannot make a telehealth Zoom call from home and cannot even make a 911 call work.   

Something else that has escaped the notice of our corner-cutting/satellite-enamored federal bureaucrats and alleged policymakers is that (1) what goes up must come down and (2) China is launching military satellites almost as fast as it is constructing coal-fired power plants.

What could they possibly do with “killer satellites”? How about shoot down our extra-terrestrial communications capability to both blind us and render our communications mute if we respond militarily when they decide to invade Taiwan? I seriously doubt that the Chinese have developed lasers that can take out buried fiber cables anywhere in the United States, but I do not doubt that they can send us ‘back to the Stone Age’ by annihilating our GPS-based economy.  

Another point to ponder concerning speed: Satellites can only do as much as existing and emerging technologies let them.  Fixed wireless has experienced significant difficulties delivering higher speeds since those assets were first deployed.  Satellites are similarly situated, despite their recent improvements. 

Fiber, on the other hand, is future-proof. Dig once, bury it and forget it about for 50 years.  Because it uses glass as its conductor, it can deliver unlimited speeds and can be upgraded on a sustainable basis for decades.  

You get what you pay for.  

Now is not the time to short-circuit BEAD. Now is not the time to deploy broadband internet on the cheap. We have been there and done that, and that is precisely what landed us in this mess to begin with.  

So, federal folks, please do us a favor.  Stop trying to fix things.  You have done more than enough harm already.  

Embrace the federalism you claim to love. The states have solved the problems you created.  Admit it and get on with your lives.  

As Ronald Reagan so famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”  

The key to good advice is taking it.  

Leave us alone. Leave BEAD alone. For once, get out of the way, and stay out of the way.  

Groundhog Day is best viewed on a screen, not lived by those who still do not have broadband internet.

State Rep. Louis Riggs
Hannibal, Missouri