Unfair to RLECs

Your recent editorial on minimum mandated broadband speeds (“Pennsylvania should adopt federal broadband definition,” June 7) is full of entertaining analogies but unfortunately the facts to support them simply don’t exist.

Your editorial fails to recognize that the minimum broadband speed established in Act 183 has been eclipsed in broad swaths of the state by the rural local exchange carriers (RLECs), member companies of the Pennsylvania Telephone Association (PTA), despite the fact that plenty of Pennsylvanians either don’t subscribe to broadband service at all or choose a speed slower than what some of your readers may consider adequate.

Your editorial also naively assumes that the RLECs have a “captive market” when this industry segment actually serves less than 10% of the voice subscriptions in the state.

Furthermore, the RLECs are the only carriers subject to the mandatory deployment provisions of the act. Any increase in speed requirements, which your editorial so stridently calls for, would apply only to a very small slice of the broadband service providers’ pie.

Finally, your characterization that the RLECs protested signing up to statutorily provide 1.544 Mbps demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of what Act 183 intended and accomplished.

The PTA member companies wholeheartedly supported the act at the time, have met or exceeded the speed requirements in the act, and are fully committed to working with the new broadband authority and all interested parties to help develop a framework which will bring additional financial support to Pennsylvania for further broadband deployment.

STEVEN J. SAMARA Pennsylvania Telephone

Association