Former FCC Chairman Pai’s Fiber Favor

Current partner at Searchlight Capital and former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman and Ajit Pai made his feelings clear on fiber on the February 12, 2025, Fiber for Breakfast podcast, as he discussed the firm’s investment strategies, his term as Chairman, and what the new administration might have in store on broadband policy.  

Watch the full Fiber for Breakfast episode here. 

“We are very bullish on fiber,” said Pai. “At the beginning of my tenure at Searchlight back in 2021, we did a very deep dive. We are not an investment firm that sees the hot, shiny new object out there and seizes it. We do what we call thematic investing, where before allocating capital that is given to us by our [Limited Partnerships], we sit down and think, ‘What is our thesis around this particular theme in the sector?’ When it comes to telecom, we studied all the technologies, all the different markets, and what we thought was that the one consistent theme in the consumer broadband experience since the dawn of the commercial internet in the 1990s is that they’re always consuming more bandwidth, and that applications and services are going to scale accordingly to consume more bandwidth.” 

In addition, Searchlight’s analysis saw the need for more symmetrical bandwidth to support emerging and growing applications such as telehealth, gaming, high-quality video conferencing, and precision agriculture. Fiber emerged as the best available technology, with Searchlight portfolio companies seeing a tremendous consumer response when they offered it to their customers. 

“The penetration rates that we had underwritten, for example, were exceeded far in front of the benchmark,” said Pai. “I think that indicated that there’s something here that consumers really like about fiber and the gigabit product in particular, even if they might not consume a gigabit or necessarily know all of the things that a gigabit connection could enable them to do. It’s something they found very attractive because it gave them the sense of reliability, capacity.” 

When asked, Pai said his greatest achievements as FCC Chairman under the first Trump administration were helping to close the digital divide and massively increasing the incentives to invest in high quality fiber broadband infrastructure, resulting in record fiber builds in 2019-2021 as documented by FBA reporting. 

“That was a good marker of the efforts that we were taking to ensure that every American has access, not just to broadband but to best in class broadband, so that by the end of our time, and certainly going forward, our hope was that no American would be left in a relatively slow lane compared to some of the more urban brethren in particular,” said Pai.  

Pai wouldn’t say much about his role on the Trump transition team, other than to say it was “singularly focused” on making sure that the framework was in place to build things in America, including getting rid of some of the “regulatory obstacles,” and making sure there are maximum incentives to raise and invest capital. 

“And so that’s what the campaign, what the transition team and the administration, I think, are going to be focused on, is, let’s get rid of some of the rules in Washington,” said Pai. “They’re standing the way of work crews putting fiber and other high-quality technologies into the ground.”