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Joe Oliva works for the Maine Broadband Coalition.
The Affordable Connectivity Program is a federally funded subsidy that goes toward making internet connections more affordable for low-income and tribal families across the country. By far the most successful program we’ve seen at addressing the digital divide at the household level and a sterling example of bipartisan/nonpartisan policymaking that truly lifts all boats, it is on track to run out of funding by April — at the latest.
More than 20 million households in America participate in this program, and more than 98,000 of an eligible 238,717 households in Maine are currently enrolled. These households are in every county across the state and represent every type of Mainer — old and young, veterans, new Mainers, those on fixed incomes, the list goes on.
According to recent national polling, the Affordable Connectivity Program enjoys overwhelming support from voters across the ideological spectrum — Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike. Another recent national poll of enrollees released recently asked about the impact of the program’s being allowed to go fallow and the responses paint a somber picture: 65 percent of participants fear losing their job or their household’s primary source of income; 75 percent of participants fear losing access to important health care services, like online appointments or prescription medicine refills; and 81 percent of enrolled parents worry about their children falling behind in school.
These fears are the hallmark problems caused by the digital divide — a term that tries to capture the discrepancies between those with the knowledge, access and means to use the internet from those without.
Crafted by the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program set aside $272 million for the Maine Connectivity Authority to administer grants to internet service providers for building broadband infrastructure in the unserved parts of the state. The Maine Connectivity Authority has worked hard at building affordability criteria into all of its grant programs, and the broadband equity program specifically etches affordability into its requirements.
Emphasizing affordability as a contingency to any public dollars being put towards infrastructure is critical and should be applauded — but is it enough to tackle the affordability problem writ large? Can those requirements supplant the need for a subsidy like the Affordable Connectivity Program?
For the time being, no. For one, there’s a timeline problem — projects awarded with Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program grants won’t come online for the consumer until 2025 at the earliest. In the meantime, Affordable Connectivity Program enrollees could be disconnected both literally and figuratively as they are forced to reallocate their resources in a time when the cost of everything is rising. These affordability requirements are also only applicable to where Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program dollars are awarded and will not be available to households outside the footprints of those networks.
State and federal programs have limited price setting ability for products offered to the consumer because the internet has not been deemed a regulated utility service at this time. The Affordable Connectivity Program helps ensure that customers can afford to use this new infrastructure currently being funded and built across the country.
If you joined us at the 2023 Maine Broadband Summit and heard Evan Feinman, director of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program at the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, speak, he made a point about the moral imperative that undergirds the work being done at all levels of the broadband ecosystem — to connect the unconnected today is a shared responsibility that we have to one another. Kerem Durdag, CEO of GWI, echoed that sentiment at a National Digital Inclusion Alliance virtual press conference last month when he said that “what we have is a societal responsibility. We believe [access to] the internet is a human right.”
Whether a subsidy like the Affordable Connectivity Program should exist in perpetuity is a fair conversation to have and one likely debated in a larger political context — but the reality is that, for the here and now, it is needed.
