Created by Congress in 2020 and renewed in 2021, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is helping 23.3 million households afford internet access. But funding for ACP—the largest, most successful internet affordability program in US history—is set to expire on May 30, 2024. This week, President Joe Biden proposed short- and long-term funding solutions in his budget. And a House bill to provide funding through the end of 2024 had 180 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. For anyone who may question the investment in affordable broadband, I’ve just completed an analysis of existing research that demonstrates that ACP creates $16.2 billion in annual benefits to users of the service subsidy, nearly twice the $8.4 billion it costs for the $30 monthly subsidy (which increases to $75 per month in Tribal lands and high-cost areas). In other words, every $1 of ACP service subsidy results in close to $2 in benefits. The upshot is clear: ACP can have positive impacts on beneficiaries’ lives—benefits that are much greater than the program’s costs. As policymakers consider the ACP’s future, they should do so knowing that the program’s costs have positive and substantial payoffs.

[John B. Horrigan is a Benton Senior Fellow and a national expert on technology adoption, digital inclusion, and evaluating the outcomes and impacts of programs designed to promote communications technology adoption and use.]

There’s a lot of talk about how the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) might make a mess of things with the Broadband Equity, Access & Deployment (BEAD) program. That’s because if a location is covered by an RDOF award, then it’s ineligible for a BEAD grant. Unfortunately, many RDOF awardees have officially defaulted on their obligations to build fiber, or they just haven’t made any progress in deploying the fiber. As a result, the locations that were supposed to be covered by RDOF could be left empty-handed. On December 20, 2023, the FCC said that it had completed all the RDOF long-form application reviews, and it published a final list of 379 recipients with winning bids totaling more than $6 billion to be paid over 10 years. The FCC published this list after a lengthy process in which several high-profile recipients such as SpaceX’s Starlink were denied funds and in which numerous companies defaulted on their RDOF bids in certain locations. But even though the FCC has reviewed RDOF defaults and set fines, some RDOF recipients may still default.

Spectrum announced the launch of Spectrum Internet, Mobile, TV and Voice services to approximately 400 homes and small businesses throughout rural Walworth County, Wisconsin. Spectrum’s newly constructed fiber-optic network buildout includes parts of the city and town of Whitewater and the towns of LaGrange and Sugar Creek. This new service is part of the company’s approximately $5 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund-related investment in unserved rural communities, partly offset by $1.2 billion in the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) RDOF auction. The company’s RDOF expansion will provide broadband access to 1.3 million customer locations across 24 states in the coming years. Spectrum has also won more than $700 million in state broadband expansion subsidies, which, combined with Spectrum investments, will connect another 300,000 homes and small businesses.