At a Digital Crossroads

Politico is not usually a place I go for material for this blog, but recently it had a Politico Tech Summit called At a Digital Crossroads. One session was sponsored by Micron (I think that's how it works) and featured the chairwoman of the FCC being interviewed about Cracking the Digital Divide. If you are reading this blog post, you almost certainly have pretty good broadband at home. When we went to work from home eighteen months ago, I realized that when my kids were in school (K-12, I mean) we had zero computers at home, and then one. Of course, the companies I worked for provided me with a laptop but if the kids were doing school on Zoom, the first thing I'd have needed to do was go and buy a couple of laptops or Chromebooks. It wouldn't have been a major financial burden for me, but that's not true for everyone in the country. And, by the way, when I had to renew my green card before I became a citizen, it cost over $500. That's an annoyance for me, but for someone on minimum wage, that's a week of work.

We, who all work in technology, need to worry not just about creating great technology, but making sure it is available to everyone and we don't end up dividing the country into technology haves and have-nots. Realistically, some of that has to come from government action, which was largely the topic of this discussion (and this blog post).

There was a digital divide before Covid, but it was a lot more debatable just how important it was for everyone to be able to access Facebook over Wi-Fi versus having to use their cellular plan. It was possible to make a case that broadband was a luxury. But once everyone's work and school are over Zoom, that whole analysis changes.

Micron

First up was Micron's CSO David Moore looking at Advancing the Data Economy with 5G and AI. I continue to be somewhat skeptical of how "transformative" 5G really is, as opposed to just being faster than 4G. Yes, I know it has lower latency and higher reliability of connections. But a lot of that depends on build-out, too. I have never once in China not had a cellular connection, including out in the country, in subway tunnels, and around the back of mountains. I suspect China built out its cellular infrastructure without paying much attention to whether it made economic sense. Or perhaps it's just that a lot more makes economic sense. After all, China Mobile (the biggest operator) has more than twice the number of subscribers than the US has people. In the US, every basestation has to make economic sense to its owner and is not regarded as strategic by anyone—company, city, state, country.

David had some surprising statistics about the memory business. At least surprising to me, maybe you already knew. Memory (DRAM and NAND) is one of the fastest-growing segments of the semiconductor industry, having grown from 10% of the industry in 2000 to 30% of the industry today. It takes a lot of wafers to do that since memory is comparatively cheap. Memory makes up ⅔ of world global wafer capacity. In the US, not so much. The US produces only 2% of the world's memory.

Of course, David is in favor of the US accelerating buildout of 5G and broadband...it will need a lot of memory to make that happen. But he does seem to genuinely believe that  AI is (and especially is going to) improve people's quality of life.

FCC

Then it was Jessica Rosenworcel, who is acting chairwoman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). Her segment was titled Cracking the Digital Divide. I'm not sure that would be the verb I would pick. Closing the digital divide seems more appropriate, but I suppose it is about cracking the problem of the digital divide.

There seem to be two separate challenges to making sure everyone has broadband. One is technical: if you live out in the middle of nowhere then you don't have a fiber or coax running by your house, so you can't just get on the phone and order up broadband, even if you can afford it. The second is financial: broadband costs money. I think the prices are too high in the US, since for most people they have a single supplier. If the US was in Europe, it would have the most expensive internet in the continent. One thing that 5G really might do is bring down prices by providing a viable alternative to cable. To distill those two challenges into single words, we could go with rural, and low-income (obviously there are also households that are both).

Jessica said she has been saying for ages

that we need a 100% policy, namely 100% of households connected to high-speed broadband service, no matter who they are or where they live. Because when we want to pull ourselves out of this pandemic, that is going to make civic life, communities, and our economy all stronger.

Those are great sentiments, but aren't we already pulling ourselves out of the pandemic? Getting everyone connected to broadband will take a period measured in many years. It took a long time to get everyone connected to electricity, and then to wireline telephone service. Of course, things happen faster today—just look at the adoption rates for, say, smartphones recently to TV in the middle of the last century. I think that there is a good case to be made that broadband in this century is of equivalent importance to electricity and telephone last century.

Jessica continued:

I think that this is an opportunity for generational change, where we make sure that we get the infrastructure to every community and then we find ways to make sure it is affordable for every household and every business.

One thing that I did not know is that there is already a program at the FCC that gives families that need financial help $50/month to purchase broadband, known as the emergency broadband benefit. More than 5.5 million households have signed up in the last couple of months since the FCC started the program. The FCC is still signing up about 200,000 households per week.

Well, just like David thinks we should all buy more memory, Jessica like us to all get more communication:

I think it is really important that we have affordability programs like this, and make sure that they are secure and sustainable.

I'm being a bit cynical, but I'm not really against this. However, I am a big believer in giving people who don't have enough money more money, and then let them make the tradeoffs as to what is most important to their families. "Our insulin is too expensive. Sure, but how about cheaper broadband instead?"

Jessica was then asked about the other aspect of making broadband available, not just the subsidies to poor households. It seems that the most recent money for grants for buildout of infrastructure has gone to the Commerce Department, not the FCC (and there is some discussion about it going to the Department of Agriculture since this is almost entirely a rural problem). Jessica was gracious:

If you stand back, what you see is that we are making an investment in generational change. And if it involves the Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture, the FCC, I think the big challenge now is to make sure that all of our programs work together to really deliver on that 100% policy.

The Emergency Broadband Benefit has allowed the FCC to take a look at a much finer level of granularity:

We now have zipcode data from across the country on the broadband benefit about who is subscribing where. We see some communities that are making real changes. More than 40% of the signups are from households that are 50 or older. We've been sharing this with the AARP since it suggests that for the first time we are getting more elderly households online with this program than we ever have before. The value of telemedicine has grown during this pandemic so there is a lot of value proposition in getting online for people who traditionally have not been.

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