Questions Remain as ACP Ends, FCC Official Tells NATOA

Tuesday marks the last day that eligible households enrolled in the affordable connectivity program will receive full funding, Miriam Montgomery, chief of the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau’s Consumer Affairs and Outreach Division, noted during a National Association of Telecommunication Officers and Advisors webinar on Monday. The webinar also included an update on the national broadband map.

“We’re at a very, very pivotal time where after tomorrow, all of the households enrolled in the program will start to see changes to their monthly internet bill,” Montgomery said. Some will receive partial benefits in May but that “really varies from provider to provider,” she said. Other households will pay an undiscounted rate starting in May, she said.

“If there is no additional funding, this program will cease to exist after May,” Montgomery said. That more than 1,700 providers participated in the ACP shows the need for it, she argued. Many students rely on it for internet access to complete their school work, while seniors and disabled people depend on ACP for telehealth connections, she said. “This is going to have a pretty significant impact for those that count on getting connected” and relied on the ACP, she said.

Montgomery said she remains hopeful that many ACP households “have already made plans” and that “they’re not getting this information for the first time.” All households should have received three notices warning that ACP is ending, she said. The FCC also encouraged that providers share information on other low-cost plans, she added.

The agency plans a fourth update of the national broadband map in May, which is getting “really, really close,” said Ed Bartholme, the bureau's deputy chief. The last update was in December.

Bartholme noted that the map doesn’t include enterprise-class or custom service offerings. “If someone has built out a dark fiber network, that’s not going to show up,” he said. Each update means checking about a billion data points, he added. “Even though we end the collection on March 1, it typically takes us until sometime in May to sort of verify the data, clean up any obvious inaccuracies … as well as just all the processing that needs to occur,” he said. The next map will offer availability data as of Dec. 31, he said.

“We have a mandate to keep doing this every six months -- we’re not going to stop,” Bartholme said.

As part of the broadband access, equity and deployment program, states must run their challenge process based on FCC data, Bartholme explained. States “can take some of our availability data, and they can tweak it a little bit” or have other types of challenges, he said. Some states are electing to remove DSL data, he said. What states can’t do is change or add missing locations to the national map, he said.

The FCC is still accepting availability challenges, Bartholme said: “If you’re still seeing providers … who don’t offer the services that they are showing on the map, that’s a great thing to bring to our attention,” he said. The FCC has received more than 4.5 million challenges to date on the service availability, he said.

The ACP was “the best and largest program we've ever had nationally to address affordability,” Bartholme said. Access to service also remains a concern and in some places in the U.S. people can get satellite broadband with no other option, he said. “If they live on the wrong side of a hill, or there’s a big tree in their yard, they may not even have access to a satellite service,” he said: “There’s still work to be done.”