FBA Official Statement in Response to Senator Thune’s Letter

“The Fiber Broadband Association appreciates Senator Thune’s letter inviting comment on a wide range of issues related to federal broadband programs. The Fiber Broadband Association believes these programs, which address both broadband availability and adoption concerns, are vital to closing the digital divide. At the same time, they should operate efficiently, neither wasting public funds nor deterring private investment. Moreover, these programs must incorporate lessons learned from the shortcomings of past efforts, most especially by providing support to build robust, reliable, future-proof, fiber broadband infrastructure at the outset, rather than deploy facilities that will need replacement within a matter of years due to outdated or otherwise limited technologies in terms of performance and reliability. Building suboptimal networks is not only a bad investment, but households with inferior connectivity cannot hope to keep up economically or socially with the almost 70 million that already have access to all-fiber networks and the tens of millions that will be connected over the next several years. Businesses, community anchor institutions, and connectivity for other critical communications infrastructure, too will suffer.”

-Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association