House panel favors broadband expansion

A House committee advanced a bill to subsidize expansion of Internet broadband service in the state even though several broadband providers oppose the bill.

House Bill 2099 by Rep. Stephen Meeks, R-Greenbrier, was approved by the House Advanced Communications and Information Technology Committee on Wednesday without dissent. It heads to the full House.

House Speaker Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, is a co-sponsor. Meeks said the bill was the result of a promise Gillam made in 2015 to look for a way to connect every home and business to high-speed Internet.

The bill would establish an incentive program to be run by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. Meeks said there aren’t plans to pay for the program this legislative session, but it could be paid for with surplus in the future.

The program would be designed to use a process known as a reverse auction to stem any losses incurred by a private company in areas underserved or lacking access to broadband.

Companies would provide competing bids for a chance to receive the money in a given area.

New York is using a similar mechanism to try to provide broadband to everyone in that state.

But telecommunications providers at Wednesday’s meeting said the measure could put millions of federal dollars at risk.

“The reverse auction process, we feel, in Arkansas is very premature,” said Katie Burns, director of government relations for CenturyLink. “There are federal funds that are pouring into the state right now.”

She said the federal government has rules for where the money is spent and the proposed program could remove certain areas from eligibility.

AT&T, Windstream and CenturyLink will receive more than $322 million from the federal government over six years to provide highspeed Internet access to more than half of the number of Arkansans who lack such service.

The Federal Communications Commission estimates two customers per every home and business will be connected. The three companies have committed to connecting 128,500 homes and businesses, meaning roughly 257,000 Arkansans will be affected by the new installations.

About 550,000 Arkansans don’t have access to the sort of speeds companies are required to offer, according to wireline data from the National Broadband Map.

So roughly 293,000 Arkansans will still lack access to high-speed Internet even with the federal money.

“Our goal, at the very beginning of this initiative, was to be able to reach all borders of this state, and that includes the unserved and underserved areas,” Gillam said in an interview.

“The federal funds altered the trajectory of what we needed to do, and we don’t intend on doing anything that the companies that are involved in that are doing, but their footprints don’t cover the entire state.”

Likewise, Meeks said rules could be adopted to prevent federal and state money from conflicting.