[1st-mile-nm] Comments per FCC Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

[Robert Jacobson]

My immediate response to the FCC's “Rural Digital Opportunity Fund” announcement yesterday? 

Just more pandering….

Via CAF-2, the preceding FCC fund, two of the vendors serving a community in which I'm working — CenturyLink and Viasat — have each taken hundreds of millions of funding, yet for two years running haven't made good on their existing pledges of seriously extending broadband service.  

Is there a reason that ths next round of funding won’t be more feathering of the ISPs’ nests?

Moreover, the FCC, by limiting distribution of the “new" funds only to communities with "no broadband service whatsoever,” means only one local customer with broadband, defined by the USDA as 10 mbps down and 1 mbps up, and by the FCC in this announcement as 25 mBps down,3 mbps up — neither of which 99% of the global internet community would consider “broadband” — will disqualify a community from receiving a grant.  The local bar streaming NFL games will suffice for this purpose. 

In short, this appears to be much adieu about nothing, just another FCC bone tossed to existing ISPs who will no doubt take their time implementing expansions (presuming they actually implement them) and use the unearned public investment to (1) better compete for urban customers and (2) increase shareholder dividends.  

Was there public comment?  The FCC press release didn’t feature any.  That was predictable.

Bob Jacobson


> On Jan 31, 2020, at 1:00 PM, 1st-mile-nm-request at mailman.dcn.org wrote:
> 
> https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-launches-20-billion-rural-digital-opportunity-fund <https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-launches-20-billion-rural-digital-opportunity-fund>
Robert Jacobson, Ph.D.
Chairman & Strategist
Atelier Tomorrow Inc.

A Non-Profit, Tax-Exempt Arizona Corporation 
Consulting to the Public & Nonprofit Sectors

• Regional and Corporate Innovation Management 
• Urban, Regional & State Innovation Platforms
• Emerging Technologies of Experience

Member:  Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD)
Member:  Design Research Council (UK)
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/bobjacobson/

1530 Blue Ridge Road
Tucson, Arizona 85745 USA

Mobile:  +1 (520) 370-1259
Email:     robert.jacobson at atelier-tomorrow.com


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20200131/f10ca36f/attachment.html>