USTelecom | The Broadband Association yesterday released a study comparing broadband deployment and adoption levels in the United States and the European Union (EU). Not surprisingly, it underscores the indisputable superiority of the former's largely hands-off approach to the public-utility model embraced by the latter.
In 2017's Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO), the FCC under then-Chairman Ajit Pai once again embraced a light-touch regulatory framework for broadband Internet access service. In an October 2020 Order on Remand responding to the D.C. Circuit's 2019 decision in Mozilla Corp. v. FCC, which largely upheld the RIFO, the Commission concluded that:
[E]ven with unprecedented increases in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, [American] broadband networks have been able to handle the increase in traffic and shift in usage patterns…. [U]nlike the European Union, which takes a utility-style approach to broadband regulation and has had to request that bandwidth intensive services such as Netflix reduce video quality in order to ease stress on its network infrastructure, the United States has not had to take similar steps, despite similar surges in Internet traffic. This country's robust and resilient broadband networks are, in significant part, the result of over two decades of almost continuous light-touch regulation, which has promoted substantial infrastructure investment and deployment.
The just-released USTelecom study, "US vs. EU Broadband Trends (2012-2019)," provides strong evidentiary support for that assessment.
Unencumbered by the investment disincentives inherent in public utility regulation, American broadband providers spend three times more on network infrastructure than their EU counterparts. As a direct consequence, the United States enjoys a substantial, across-the-board advantage with respect to both deployment and adoption:
- Facilities that can deliver 30 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream cover 12 percent more of the U.S., and infrastructure capable of 100 Mbps or greater downstream has been constructed in 25 percent more of this country.
- Over 9 percent more Americans subscribe to 30 Mbps service, and over 21 percent more subscribe to 100 Mbps or greater packages.
American leadership is even more pronounced in rural areas, where deployment of 30 Mbps service exceeds that in the EU by over 22 percent.
To quote USTelecom President and CEO Jonathan Spalter, "if the U.S. had followed the EU's more regulatory path, then our nation's digital divide could be more than triple what it is today."
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