Concepts like “Dig Once,” are gaining traction on Capitol Hill as lawmakers grapple with ways to remove barriers for the deployment of broadband infrastructure. In a hearing this week covered by Inside Towers, the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology discussed draft legislation first proposed by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Greg Walden (R-OR) in 2015 that would require installing a conduit during construction of a federally-funded highway or road in an area that needs more broadband.
Failure to implement Dig Once means more construction, more disruption, and much higher costs for private providers — who may simply decide not to deploy in an area where the economics don’t work, say several think tanks led by Tech Freedom in a letter to the subcommittee. “A study by the GAO showed that ‘Dig Once’ policies can reduce the cost of deploying fiber under highways in urban areas by 25–33 percent and by roughly 16 percent in rural areas. These cost reductions add up to enormous savings in the context of multi-million-dollar builds.”
Dig Once should not be limited to conduits installed under hard surfaces (like asphalt); it may be more useful and cheaper to install conduits in the rights-of-way alongside highways during a road project. The rationale underlying Dig Once — it makes sense to coordinate among multiple users, and accommodating potential future users in a single conduit — also applies to publicly owned rights-of-way, according to this line of thinking. “It makes sense to coordinate multiple parties when they want to put up new poles, or use existing poles, or to use currently ‘dumb’ infrastructure like highway lamps to support new antennas.”
Tom Struble, TechFreedom Policy Counsel, calls bills like the draft put forward by Rep. Eshoo, and Sen. John Thune’s MOBILE NOW Act, a “good start;” They seek to create the right framework for boosting deployment by making smarter use of public assets and requiring states to play an active role in coordinating broadband infrastructure deployment on government lands, according to Struble.
March 23, 2017
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