Federal Communications Commission	"FCC  XX-XXX"


STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL,
DISSENTING

Re: 	Inquiry Concerning Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications Capability to All Americans in a Reasonable and Timely Fashion, GN Docket No. 20-269.

We are in the middle of a pandemic.  So much of modern life has migrated online.  As a result, it has become painfully clear there are too many people in the United States who lack access to broadband.  In fact, if this crisis has revealed anything, it is the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big.
So it confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. 
If you want evidence this is not right, it’s all around us.  There are people sitting in parking lots using free Wi-Fi signals because they have no other way to get online.  There are students who fall in the homework gap because the lack the high-speed service they need to participate in remote learning.  There are mayors in towns across the country clamoring for better broadband so their communities have a fair shot at digital age success.  Across the country there are state authorities developing new plans, maps, and initiatives at the behest of their residents. Then there’s Congress, which took its cues from all of this, and just passed legislation committing $7 billion to new nationwide broadband efforts—and more is likely to come.   
What I take from all of this activity is that the job is not done.  There is progress.  But we have not yet reached all Americans.  We have real work to do before we can claim that 100% of this country has access to broadband service.  I dissent.



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