California’s Broadband Fund Ignores Fiber and Favors Slow DSL

The California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), a program launched in 2008 to connect all Californians to high-speed Internet, was an early success. It helped build middle mile open access fiber to hard-to-serve communities and delivered high-speed access to areas that never had Internet. It funded fiber-to-the-home to public housing, ensuring low income users had the same high-speed access that wealthy neighborhoods had. And it was rapidly closing the digital divide that low income urban and rural Californians faced, due to years of neglect from incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs). But CASF’s success inevitably led to its undoing—by drawing attention from lobbyists for AT&T, Frontier, and Comcast, who pushed through laws that effectively shut the program down. 

Fearing competition and substitution, these ISPs have regularly gone to Sacramento to pass laws under the false promise that less government involvement will help expand broadband access. Yet the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the Sacramento ISP lobby has actually done nothing more than ensure most Californians have only one choice of provider, and ensured that the state has no broadband plan while our international competitors march aggressively towards a gigabit fiber future. But there have been recent victories to reverse this trend, including: restoring the California Public Utilities Commission’s regulatory authority over broadband companies, the state’s passage of the strongest net neutrality law in the land (that is still facing litigation from the ISPs), and Gov Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) Call for a Broadband For All Plan.