Broadband and Digital Inclusion with Lukas Pietrzak

Last semester, editor in chief Nicole Dan discussed broadband policy with Lukas Pietrzak, a second year MPP student and policy associate at Next Century Cities.

Follow Lukas on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Ltpietrzak

New America’s Cost of Connectivity Report: https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/cost-connectivity-2020/

Check out more from the Georgetown Public Policy Review: http://www.gppreview.com/

Theme Music by Russell Lawrence

Podcast transcript:

Nicole Dan: Hi, My name is Nicole Dan and I’m the editor in chief of the Georgetown Public Policy Review. With the increasing importance of an internet connection during this pandemic, I thought now would be a great time to discuss broadband policy with Lukas Pietrzak, a second year Master of Public Policy student at McCourt.

Lukas Pietrzak: Yeah. Hi, my name is Lukas Pietrzak and I am a second year MPP student in the McCourt school and I also am a policy associate at Next Century Cities.

Dan: Great. So just for our audience, can you define broadband?

Pietrzak: Yeah so broadband according to the federal government and the Federal Communications Commission is a connection to The World Wide Web, or the internet backbone that’s coming into someone’s home at speeds that are 25 megabits per second downloading and three megabits per second uploading.

Dan: So does everybody agree about that or is there a little disagreement there?

Pietrzak: So that’s a great question. Actually, and that was very much a technical definition of broadband itself as a technology. There is some conversation right now because it’s actually been a number of years since the Federal Communications Commission addressed what broadband is obviously to the everyday person when you ask them what’s broadband, they simply say it’s the internet connection that’s coming into my house. And most people don’t think about speeds outside of when they’re buying their first package or subscribing and deciding what they think they need. But in terms of that government definition, there has been some heated debate between Commissioners on the FCC – which there’s five of them, four that are currently serving and one seat that’s about to become vacant – and internet providers who are actually providing the service and advocates and private citizens. 

It’s been interesting because as technologies have advanced and we’ve hooked up more and more things to our internet connections in our home, advocates, local government officials, everyday citizens have really pushed the government to increase that definition possibly up to 100 megabits per second download and 25 or even 50 megabits per second, upload speeds, whereas many internet providers have said, “Why are we going to do that what we’re serving right now is getting the job done for people?” And some listeners who may not know anything about broadband policy up to this point might be asking, why does it matter how we define broadband at the end of the day, if the government says it’s one thing I may still pay for more. But what we have to remember is what’s available to us here in Washington or, you know, New York City or Chicago or even where I’m from Virginia Beach, which is a well developed suburb, we have the opportunity to subscribe, all the way up to a gigabit speed for our internet but in some of these communities that still don’t have a broadband connection – of which there’s many – they are being given what the government is defining because when the government gives funding to private internet companies to lay fiber optic cable or coax or put up some sort of wireless solution there are requirements in the grants that say you as a provider have to provide this minimum speed. And until we increase that we may be having gigabit speeds here in Washington, DC, or I personally have, I believe, 600 megabits per second that I pay for someone else in rural Iowa may just be getting 25/3 and they may not actually even be receiving what the company says they’re providing.

Dan: So what drew you to broadband as a policy niche?

Pietrzak: So in college, I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I actually took a class called media policy and law by a professor, his name is Christopher Ali. He is a big academic in the broadband policy field. And he spent a unit talking about rural broadband and specifically talking about precision agriculture, which for those who don’t know, precision agriculture is this fascinating thing where farmers can use wireless technology to run their combines with remote control, you know, measure nutrients in the soil, measure water in the soil, oxygenation sort of all of these things that used to have to be done by hand. And after he taught us this unit, I actually went to him and it piqued my interest into the broadband world more broadly. And then in my fourth year at UVA I undertook an independent study with him, where I looked at Albemarle County, which surrounds the University of Virginia, and looked at their broadband availability, because they are a semi rural farming semi developed county, which actually is a lot of counties in Virginia and was able to spend some time investigating down and working with their county government. And from there, when I arrived in DC, the academic and professional opportunities presented themselves, and then I just fell absolutely in love with the field.

Dan: Actually Albemarle County is one that we always talk about at NTIA So for those that are listening I interned there, so.

Pietrzak: Look at that, it’s a very interesting county. It’s very wealthy, but they still really struggle with getting broadband out and knowing where all of their broadband is. I was in a meeting one time, and it was their advisory board for broadband and something had happened and they didn’t even know which telephone poles the county owned and which ones were privately owned so it was fascinating.

Dan: I know that you’ve done a lot of work relating to digital redlining, can you explain what that is and why that can be problematic?

Pietrzak: Yeah so digital redlining is something that the National Digital Inclusion Alliance spends a lot of time working on there, another organization based here in Washington, DC. And they actually have looked at some historically racially and socioeconomically segregated cities across the country, specifically places like Cleveland and Detroit. And they have looked at whether or not private internet companies are doing two things: whether they are a) deploying their network infrastructure so coax cables fiber optic cables to neighborhoods based off of racial demographics. So basically, are they deploying it at faster rates and more effectively to rich white neighborhoods, as compared to lower income majority minority neighborhoods.

And the second thing that we’re starting to notice more now is what does network upgrades look like? So a lot of communities that are technically served according to the government are still served over copper cables, which were put in the ground decades ago and or on telephone poles decades ago and NDIA is starting to look at yes at AT&T or Verizon or Comcast say that they have service here. But when is the last time that that infrastructure was upgraded? And, you know, the way reporting works for the federal government is they just have to say in ideal conditions what speeds can be delivered over that wire.

But obviously a piece of copper that’s been in the ground for 30 years is not going to perform at ideal conditions, just your wear and tear and other environmental factors and so redlining is really looking at what decisions are being made. And obviously, these may be business decisions because in some communities, you know that your subscribers are going to pay for faster speeds. So you give it to them. That’s a simple business decision. But, in turn, how much are we hurting is lower income and historically overlooked communities as we sort of plan for the future.

Dan: So I feel like you mentioned another kind of buzzword there – digital inclusion. So what is that, and does that also involve devices or is it just broadband?

Pietrzak: Yeah so digital inclusion is actually something that’s probably been talked about more recently, or rather the conversation has become larger recently. And it involves both broadband and devices and it starts with firstly, everyone needs to have cables in the ground, period. End of discussion. You need to have the connectivity, whether it’s through cable fiber optics sort of any of those fixed terrestrial options like we call them. That has to be there otherwise someone quite literally cannot be digitally included because they don’t have the connection.

But then the second step of broadband that we talked a lot about at the organization I work for is the adoption piece. And yes, there may be a fiber optic cable running to my house, but can I afford to turn it on. And that’s something that’s overlooked by certain organizations and certain government agencies and talked about by others. Again, very much debated, especially in the midst of COVID – but it’s making sure that everyone has the financial means and the knowledge of what broadband can bring them to be able to invest in turning it on because, as you know, I’m sure, Nicole, broadband isn’t cheap, it’s not. It’s probably one of my most expensive bills, and people have to understand that it’s a big investment. And the Pew Research Group – if you’ve seen things from them – they find time and time again that cost is most likely the number one barrier to adoption for most American families.

So once we get the cables to them, once we get the cables turned on, the question then becomes the devices. And you know, it’s great to have an internet connection to your home, but you need a computer, you need a tablet, you need a cell phone you need something that you’re sort of going off of your Wi Fi or off your Ethernet connection. And that’s sort of when that second step kicks in. And we have to get devices to students, which a lot of school districts have done, especially with distance learning, and we have to get devices to people applying for jobs or hoping to get government services. And we have to teach them how to use them because, you know, putting a laptop in the hand of a student is great in theory but if they don’t know how to use it. Who are they going to ask for help? Their parents. And if their parents have never had a laptop before they don’t know what they’re doing. And oftentimes it leads to frustration and then students don’t complete their homework, you know, parents can’t apply for new jobs that they’ve lost their job during COVID. So that digital inclusion sort of umbrella includes that literacy piece at the very end. And although it’s at the end, I like to say it’s probably the most important because it’s when you teach people how to get online and sort of the benefits of what that device and what that connection can do for them.

Dan: So I’ve noticed that you also talk a lot about universal broadband. Do you think that with COVID and how everybody kind of needs broadband now, do you think that’s opened up the discussion for that? And where do you think that’s headed?

Pietrzak: I think it is absolutely opened up the conversation. I actually read a piece this morning from the Benton Institute for Society and Broadband or Broadband and Society – I think I got that flipped. And one of their fellows was talking about the fact that the problems we’re seeing right now, during COVID have always been there. The digital divide, as you know well, has been there for years, you know, the lack of digital literacy has been there since the advent of the internet in the 90s.

And it’s just now that members of Congress are having to work from home that people are seeing it. And it’s just now that you know, sadly, thousands of people are dying across the country because they don’t have access to good health care to fight COVID, that people are realizing: wow, telemedicine actually matters. And these are conversations that advocates have been having for a very long time and even dedicated members of the, you know, federal government who’ve been working on this for decades. Everybody has been talking but it’s finally that the right people are listening. 

And there was an iconic moment earlier this year, during one of the Senate Commerce hearings about COVID and universal broadband and Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee was actually mid sentence talking about universal broadband in her state and her connection cut out because she had spotty connections at her state office. And so I think more people are paying attention, because we have tech CEOs or just any sort of, you know, often well-off, wealthy, well-connected businessmen and women across the country who are working from home and realizing that they pay a lot of money for their internet and it’s still bad. And they’re realizing I can afford a good connection and I live, you know, in midtown Manhattan – I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone who lives in Kansas or North Dakota, South Dakota, or even in Washington DC here. Those of us who live in wards, you know, two, three sort of you know, around downtown live well and we’re finally having our eyes opened up to the fact that in our same city, in wards seven and eight, people can’t connect to the internet. It’s just not feasible. So I think it has given us a lot of motivation to really fight for universal broadband.

And I’m hoping that you know it’s good news that the vaccine is coming for COVID and we’re going to be able to sort of dig ourselves out of this. But I hope that the conversation doesn’t end as soon as everyone goes back to the office and I don’t think it will. I think people’s eyes have really been opened, and, you know, the next question and I don’t know if we’re talking about this later, but we really don’t know how many people lack broadband. It could be anywhere between 10 million and Microsoft says it could be closer to 150 million. So really the conversation needs to keep happening because people need to recognize that this problem is larger than anything we could have imagined.

Dan: You mentioned, we don’t know who doesn’t have broadband. Do we know anything about the affordability of broadband? How many people are not connecting because they just can’t afford to versus having it because they don’t have the infrastructure for it?

Pietrzak: Yeah, that’s a great question. And to address your second part first, the number I gave earlier – the somewhere between 10 million and 150 million is about how many we think can’t connect simply because they don’t have the service available to them. The number range probably seems huge to anyone who is hearing it for the first time and that’s mostly because the 10 million number is given to us by the government through self-reporting process for internet companies say this is who we serve. And the Microsoft number was taken from measuring upload and download speeds during updates to computers that run Windows. And so we sort of have to figure that out. And there are people in Congress and across the country who are trying to get better data collection to figure out the answer to that question. 

And we’re sort of waiting on that now, but for the affordability piece, we really don’t know. I actually last summer, was it last summer. Yes. Last summer, I was a Google policy fellow at Open Technology Institute that’s housed at New America – a nonprofit here in Washington. And we embarked on what they call the Cost of Connectivity and it’s a report that new America and OCI put together a few years ago they published it three years in a row during the Obama administration and then discontinued it just because the manpower was you know, sort of overwhelming for a nonprofit of their size and it was something that at the time President Obama and his administration looked at they used those numbers to push for universal broadband funding. And then last summer in 2019 the Open Technology team said we want to bring this back. You know, there’s so much going on in the world of broadband now things have changed in the last five or six years, we need to see what’s happening. So I, the lowly fellow, was tasked with starting data collection. Because currently, the federal government does not collect pricing data for internet companies. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle that pushed for it and time and time again private providers and trade groups, such as the US Telecom, have said that its proprietary information and that it would hurt competition and hurt innovation and sort of investment and entrepreneurship, if they had to divulge what they were charging for broadband across the country.

Now mind you, any person in the US, regardless of who you are, can go online and look up what it would cost to subscribe to Comcast or Verizon or AT&T right now for your address. It’s available, you can search and pull it right up. But they’ve said that if all this was put into one sort of data reservoir, it would hurt all of them. And so I had to start from scratch because there wasn’t information anywhere. And I started digging through countless internet service provider websites – some easier than others – and I eventually came across an issue. 

Since the original publication of the first Cost of Connectivity reports during the second Obama term, these companies have added requirements to their website user agreements that data cannot be collected from their websites except for the explicit purpose of subscribing or considering subscription to their internet.

And so we sort of faced this legal roadblock where we now had to decide, was it newsworthy enough for us to continue down this venture that could possibly land the organization in some hot water. And I just need to clarify for clarity sake I am no longer and with OTI I was with them until April when my, basically my job requirements were met. And so I won’t talk about too much with what that looked like. But I will say that, you know, this past summer OTI, and actually one of my colleagues from the time Claire Park, who became the primary author on the report published the Cost of Connectivity. And they had pulled together thousands of data values over the course of the year to see exactly what Americans were paying across the country for broadband and then comparing it to European and Asian counterparts to see what we pay compared to the rest of the world and it is astounding how much higher Americans pay for internet. Honestly, how much higher we pay for lower speeds.

So I encourage anyone who’s listening to this to go to the Open Technology Institute website and read the report. It currently is the only holistic and sort of comprehensive pricing data report that exists. I think that answered your question, I hope.

Dan: Yes, it did. And also we can include a link to the report in the show notes for this. So what would you recommend for people who want to get more involved in broadband and want to learn more?

Pietrzak: Yeah, so if you want to learn more about broadband. I would definitely tell you a great place to start is actually the Benton Institute, they are based out of Illinois, but they put out a phenomenal newsletter every single morning, along with weekly things, other things, that sort of gives you a digest of this is the broadband world in a nutshell. I will tell you, it is a very deep policy field that covers a lot of things. And I’ve been going at this now for – I guess it’s probably my fourth or fifth year thinking about broadband and reading about broadband and there are still conversations that I walk into and have no idea what’s happening.

Because if we had hours for the two of us to talk, we could get into satellite policy, cell phone policy, monopolies, everything sort of along those lines. And I tell people broadband is probably a very unique policy field and that it touches almost every other policy field that exists. So if you’re listening to this and you right now study health policy or you’re interested in environmental policy or something along those lines, I’m sorry, my dog is making noise behind me now. If you’re interested in health policy or environmental policy or even, you know, national security policy, one thing you can definitely do is look for the intersection between broadband and what you’re doing. It’s a great place to start, because you will be able to figure out what interests you first and broadband and go from there. So definitely start with the Benton Society, come to our website next century cities or literally just start googling it there’s so much information out there and so many articles have been published since March with the pandemic that you are bound to find something in this field that you find interesting.

Dan: Cool. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?

Pietrzak: Really my last thing is just keep having the conversation look up what you’re paying for your internet and look up who in your city or your hometown still doesn’t have internet. And honestly, go on to the FCC website and look at the broadband availability map. I get lost in it sometimes because I’m a nerd and just dig and swipe and dig and swipe further and further, and see what’s going on. See what Nicole’s old office is doing at BroadbandUSA and the way that states are trying to battle this by coming together and just keep paying attention and the best piece of advice I like to give people is: hold your internet company accountable because the only way that we really elicit change. And this is gonna sound so cliche and I already know it, but it’s from the bottom up. At the end of the day they serve the consumers and our government serves their constituents. So be a thorn in their side and make it happen.

Dan: Thank you, do you want people to follow you on Twitter?

Pietrzak: People can follow me on Twitter if they want. I will say maybe 30% to 50% of my feed is broadband related, the rest is just my dog. So if you want to follow me, you can. It’s just ltpietrzak my last name. So if you follow me, I’ll tweet some fun broadband articles and some fun facts. Nicole follows me so she knows it’s a fun hodgepodge of an adventure.

Dan: Thanks again for doing this. 

Pietrzak: Thanks, Nicole

Dan:  I think it would be really great to educate people on broadband.

Pietrzak: I’m telling you, it’s something that affects it is the most impactful and least talked about policy issue, in my opinion.

Dan: Thanks for listening to the Georgetown Public Policy Review podcast. I’m hoping to make this a series on McCourt students who are working on interesting projects or have a unique policy niche. If this is you, or someone you know would be a good fit, please email me at editorinchief@gppreview.com. Please subscribe, and check out more, including details on how to submit to our spring edition at gppreview.com