FCC Opens New Inquiry into the State of Broadband Deployment

On September 6, the FCC announced that it was opening its eighteenth inquiry on the state of broadband in the U.S., which is expected to culminate in the next iteration of the Commission’s Section 706 report. Under Section 706(b) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Commission is required to annually determine "whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion." In other words, for the upcoming report, the Commission is required to assess whether broadband Internet access service – an advanced telecommunications service under the statute – is being timely deployed to all Americans.

Earlier this year, the Commission initiated a proceeding for its forthcoming Communications Marketplace Competition report – a different report that includes an assessment of the broadband market over the previous two years. In public comments filed in June of this year, Free State Foundation scholars wrote: "In 2022 and 2023, overall conditions in the broadband Internet services market were effectively competitive, in many instances even more so than in 2020 and 2021 when this was already the case." FSF's comments cited publicly available data points, including broadband provider quarterly reports and analyst estimates, about fiber deployments, cable broadband network upgrades and footprint expansion, nationwide 5G network upgrades and new deployments, 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) entry in the residential broadband market, cross-platform competition from cable-hybrid wireless providers, and improvements in satellite broadband capabilities to support that conclusion. 

 

The pro-deployment trends from 2022-2023 identified on FSF's comments in the 2024 Communications Marketplace Competition Report proceeding appear to support an affirmative answer to the question that the Commission is addressing in its upcoming Section 706 report. Yet the Commission's just-opened Section 706 proceeding will provide a forum for considering more recent data about availability and deployment progress and enable a more definitive determination about the current state of ongoing broadband deployment. 

 

Expect Free State Foundation scholars to have more to say this year about the state broadband deployment to all Americans. FSF's public comments from December 2023 that were filed in the Commission's previous Section 706 report proceeding can be found on FSF's website.