• Expect substantial broadband progress over the next five or six years, CTC says
• Rural electric cooperatives are filling gaps; open-access economics remain difficult
• Power and communications need coordination as AI moves into industry
America is making real progress towards closing its broadband gaps, according to Joanne Hovis, president and CEO of CTC Technology & Energy, a public-sector broadband consultancy. The harder question is whether that progress will deliver the coordinated infrastructure needed for its next industrial economy.
“We are deploying and building and investing extensively now,” she said in an FNTV interview this week.
After 30 years in broadband, Hovis believes America has moved beyond failing to appreciate the importance of communications infrastructure. Public funding, private investment and rural electric cooperatives are putting the country on a stronger footing.
That gave me something positive to take away from our chat. But we disagreed about whether investment within separate infrastructure sectors will produce a coherent whole. This was a reasoned disagreement, incidentally, with evidence and experience on both sides — a form of conversation that America could use rather more of.
Hovis expects robust terrestrial infrastructure, predominantly fiber, to reach the vast majority of currently unserved or underserved locations, with substantial progress over five or six years as BEAD funding and suburban private investment come to fruition.
The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program was allocated $42.45 billion in 2021, though distribution has been extraordinarily slow. Still, Hovis places it within a longer positive history of federal broadband support: “And that's really been entirely bipartisan, both Democrats and Republicans strongly in support.”
Member-owned rural electric cooperatives are particularly important, building where conventional commercial economics have left people disconnected. Investor-owned utilities have taken a different route: Dominion Energy and American Electric Power, for example, have developed middle-mile fiber programs supporting internet service providers. Hovis does not expect widespread utility entry into the fiber-to-the-home market.
Open access presents tougher economics. In low-density areas, even one operator can struggle to cover maintenance, network renewal and operating costs. Splitting modest revenues between infrastructure owners and service providers makes that harder. Hovis acknowledged successes including UTOPIA, but argued that the U.S. market has not supported the model at European scale.
The conversation became trickier when we moved from connecting premises to connecting infrastructure systems. Electricity and communications are interdependent: networks need power, and the grid needs communications for intelligence, resilience and rapid response.
“The electric infrastructure is the bones, the communications infrastructure that sits on top of it is the nervous system,” Hovis said.
She supports coordinated public policy planning. But these systems have different owners, regulations and overlapping authorities. She expects cooperation more readily than a wholesale reconstruction of the markets.
“We don't have a system that rewards enormous speed,” she said of utility modernization, where regulators must approve spending borne by ratepayers. Federal policy and funding can accelerate progress.
My concern is whether incremental improvement can meet the demands of an economy in which intelligence operates factories, utilities and other physical systems. Power, communications, computing and industrial operations must work together. Progress in one layer does not establish a strategy for the others.
“I'm not sure I agree with you that it's the worst infrastructure policy,” Hovis replied. America has achieved considerable economic success without the long-term planning used elsewhere.
She recalled a camping holiday in China where she stayed in an abandoned Chinese schoolhouse without water or plumbing, but with fiber. Impressive connectivity, certainly. Whether that connection represented the best use of public money was another question.
On AI, she expects potential returns to attract investment into supporting infrastructure. “When the economics work, the capital follows, both public and private.”
She qualified that confidence: broadband is her expertise, not water infrastructure. She judges communications deployment to be largely keeping pace with current AI development; her expectation that power and water will follow rests on the economics.
Our disagreement remains. Meeting demand from today’s AI developments is a narrower ambition than preparing an integrated digital industrial economy. America is building more of the essential foundation. It still needs to decide what it intends to build on top of it.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.