Section 706 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to conduct an annual inquiry to determine the availability of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans to determine whether this capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. In recent years the term advanced services has come to mean broadband deployment. If the Commission decides broadband deployment is unsatisfactory, it must take immediate action to accelerate deployment by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.
According to the current Republican dominated FCC, the Democrat dominated FCC erred in its 2024 section 706 inquiry by including extraneous universal service goals such as adoption, affordability, availability, and equitable access to broadband throughout the United States as the metrics for determining broadband deployment is sufficient The new Commission has decided that this change in focus was wrong and has decided to once again use only broadband deployment as the sole measure of meeting the section 706 requirements. It does so in Docket 25-223, in the “Nineteenth Section 706 Report Notice of Inquiry” (Report and Notice) released on August 8, 2025.
We propose to reorient the section 706 inquiry back to the plain language of the statute and eliminate this expansion… The statute identifies “availability”—and “availability” alone—as the object of the Commission’s section 706 inquiry. Further, the subject of the availability inquiry is whether broadband “is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” Consistent with the statute’s plain language, we therefore believe that the section 706 inquiry should singularly focus on the availability of advanced telecommunications capability, as measured through the deployment of broadband. Accordingly, we propose to focus the section 706 inquiry on whether advanced telecommunications capability “is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. (Report and Notice, at para. 5).
As part of its analysis, the agency seeks industry comments on the following questions:
Have there been changes in the marketplace and, if so, what does that imply about whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion?
Should fixed and mobile broadband be analyzed separately or together?
Should the Commission again use 100/20 Mbps as its benchmark in defining advanced telecommunications capability for fixed broadband?
Should there be a fixed benchmark speed for mobile broadband?
Should the industry continue to use the Broadband Data Collection as the primary source of data for fixed broadband data collection?
Industry comments on these questions are due on September 8, 2025. Reply comments are due on September 23, 2025.
In the Report and Notice, the FCC takes one additional important action. To return to the “plain language” of section 706, it plans to “abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report. Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in section 706 but maintaining such a goal risk skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers.”
Anna Gomez the one Democrat on the Commission supported the Notice of Inquiry, but only because it gets the public involved on these issues. She is especially upset that the Commission will not include affordability in its analysis.
Some point to existing law to argue that availability is the only metric Congress allows to measure broadband deployment success. But the law does not require this agency to view broadband availability with one eye closed and the other one half-open. That argument ignores recent legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which was enacted to broaden the scope of that approach. As the Commerce Department seeks to redefine the goals of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, one must wonder if this is a coordinated effort to roll out the “Mission Accomplished” banner as millions remain without access to a fast, reliable, and affordable way to participate in the main aspects of modern life. (Notice and Inquiry, Statement of Anna M. Gomez).