Conexon Blog

Is Rural Electrification the Model for Rural Broadband?

By Conexon | May 18, 2021

As a nation, we can and should build fiber to every rural home, farm and business. A New Covenant.   It has become fashionable of late to reference the rural…

Sunk Costs: A Cautionary Tale

By Conexon | April 5, 2021

How the FCC wasted $45 billion on rural “broadband” and what the current FCC/Congress/Administration should have learned.   Sunk costs, as an economics concept, is easy to understand. It’s an…

A New Section 254: A “Connect All Americans” Proposal

By Conexon | March 3, 2021

When I was less gray, I worked on Capitol Hill as Minority Staff Director of the Senate Commerce Committee. At that time, we drafted legislation to bring competition to various…

Fix the RDOF Now (part 2)

By Conexon | March 2, 2021

Let us suppose the FCC, during the RDOF long-form application reviews, follows the wishes of scores of Senators and House members “to validate that each provider in fact has the…

Fix the RDOF now

By Conexon | February 3, 2021

Recently, the FCC received a letter from members of Congress urging it to use the RDOF long-form application process to ensure that winning bidders are capable of meeting their obligations….

The Rural Broadband Acceleration Act: An Explainer

By Jonathan Chambers | July 20, 2020

The idea started out simply enough. In January, the FCC had adopted its RDOF auction design whereby Gigabit tier bidders would win in the auction against all other bidders. In…

Accelerate the RDOF: How to Spend Billions for Long-Term Critical Broadband Infrastructure, Create Jobs and Stimulate the Rural Economy NOW

By Jonathan Chambers | March 18, 2020

At a time of uncertainty, one thing is certain. The world is interconnected in many ways, and the future of information, education, work, health care, shopping, social connection and entertainment…

SpaceX is Aptly Named (Space Pig-in-a-Poke was apparently already taken)

By Jonathan Chambers | March 5, 2020

Earlier this week, the FCC released a Public Notice that proposed the most significant change to date to Chairman Pai’s signature broadband policy, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). A…

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund: Conexon’s Comments filed with the FCC

By Jonathan Chambers | September 23, 2019

Summary A decade ago, the FCC set a course to put rural America at a long-term disadvantage to the rest of the country. At a time when the FCC projected…

A Lost Decade: Ten years ago, the federal government began to implement a broadband policy that put rural America at a structural economic disadvantage to the rest of the country. We can do better.

By Jonathan Chambers | September 11, 2019

It’s been over a decade since passage of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA), which in part allocated many millions of dollars to the FCC to write a national…