Broadband Stimulus: Who is "Unserved," and Why?

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration and Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service have gotten around to accepting public testimony about what an "unserved" or "underserved" community is.

That public input on this subject, which began in Las Vegas on March 17, continues today in Flagstaff, Ariz., and will continue on March 19 in Washington, D.C., already offers us a chance to make a few observations.

Though most of the meeting testimony was non-quantifiable, it is clear that there are "unserved" areas in the sense of places where the cost of wired networks is extraordinary, and many places where service might exist, but is "underserved" in the sense of not receiving speeds that now are increasingly common in urbanized areas with significant competition.

The moderator of the Las Vegas meeting thanked the presenters for illustrating that unmet demand exists. Anybody who has been in the communications business long enough, and especially those familiar with the broad expanse of the intermountain West and Great Plains, knows exactly what an "unserved" or "underserved" area looks like, and why those areas either are unserved or underserved by wired facilities. It's a bit like pornography: people tend to know, without a precise definition, what it is.

Almost as predictably, some observers are wagging their fingers about mean old greedy telephone companies that don't want to provide service. Typically, people who make those charges don't live in any parts of the non-urban intermountain West, the expanses of the Great Plains, up and down the Yukon River or the Alaska panhandle, for example.

People often assume that customer demand is unmet because service providers don't want to provide service. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most small, rural communications providers, some of which are cooperatives, suffer from a lack of customers. Of the 1,000 or so small, independent telcos or cooperatives in the United States, half to 70 percent (or more, in some cases) of total revenue comes from other telecom companies in the form of "access charges" (allowing customers to receive long distance calls) or from support mechanisms such as the Universal Service Fund.

That means half to 70 percent of revenues do not come directly from customers, in part because there are so few customers, and in part because those customers do not pay anything like a rate that would provide an actual financial return on providing service. Put another way, the most-important revenue sources are other telecom providers and taxpayer subsidies provided precisely because, in the absense of those subsidies, wired network service simply is not feasible.

At the same time, terrestrial wireless and satellite alternatives do exist, and may in many cases represent rational ways to deliver services fast, at reasonable cost. Nobody disagrees that rural users should have services comparable to those provided to urban customers, at equivalent rates. The problem is that the cost of providing such services, using wired facilities, in rural areas, is disproportionately, punishingly high. "Average" costs don't make sense where it comes to actual access facilities.

Wired providers have a key role to play, but will lose money for every new "unserved" customer they add. Asking them to do that without subsidies ensures they will not act. At the same time, mobile, satellite and other technologies now offer alternate ways to provide voice and bandwidth services very fast or relatively fast, with less investment. Only satellite actually is positioned to offer service on a continuing basis with any actual hope of making an actual profit, at prices equivalent with those paid by urban or suburban users. Terrestrial wireless might or might not offer a return, depending on "density," where there might be an average of half a person per square mile.

Access is a real issue. Ability to provide access without some sort of subsidy is questionable in many cases. All the more reason to be rational about getting investment to people who need it, in a rational way. In some cases, that will mean ensuring a wired networked alternative. In other cases wireless might make more sense. In lots of cases, only satellite makes genuine sense.

Hopefully rational investments is what we will get.