FCC - Chair Wheeler & Commissioner Clyburn introduced Lifeline program for Broadband

L-R:  Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and Chairman Tom Wheeler
 - Federal Communication Commission

March 8, 2016 - 11:00 am

Broadband: A Lifeline for the 21st Century

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably come to take Internet access for granted. 

Without even thinking about it, millions of us go online multiple times daily, to check e-mail, catch up on the news, or shop or stream our favorite shows while the kids research their homework assignments on the Web. 

Now imagine if that Internet connection were severed. 

Almost every aspect of your life would be disrupted: how you keep in touch with friends and family; how you do your job; how you get news and entertainment; how you make informed financial decisions. More than sixty-four million Americans, however, don’t have to imagine life without an Internet connection; they live on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The biggest reason these Americans don’t sign up for broadband is cost. Only half of the nation’s households in the lowest income tier subscribe to broadband. 

The biggest reason these Americans don’t sign up for broadband is cost. Only half of the nation’s households in the lowest income tier subscribe to broadband. And 43 percent of all people who don’t subscribe to broadband at home say that affordability is the reason. Of the low income consumers who have subscribed to mobile broadband, 44% have to had cancel or suspend their service due to financial constraints and for those whose only access to the Internet is their smart phone, 48% have had to cancel or shut off service for a period of time due to financial hardship.

We can recite statistics all we want, but we must never lose sight of the fact that what we’re really talking about is people – unemployed workers who miss out on jobs that are only listed online, students who go to fast-food restaurants to use the Wi-Fi hotspots to do homework, veterans who are unable to apply for their hard-earned benefits, seniors who can’t look up health information when they get sick.

Internet access has become a pre-requisite for full participation in our economy and our society, but nearly one in five Americans is still not benefitting from the opportunities made possible by the most powerful and pervasive platform in history.

We can do better. We must do better. Indeed, Congress told us to do better.  By modernizing the FCC’s Lifeline program, we will do better.

Lifeline was established in 1985 to help low-income Americans afford access to vital communications, and the program has allowed tens of millions of Americans to afford basic phone service. But at a time when our economy and lives are increasingly moving online and millions of Americans remain offline, it doesn’t make sense for Lifeline to remain focused only on 20th century voice service.

Today, we are putting forward a proposal to help close the broadband affordability gap by modernizing the FCC’s Lifeline program. There are three central facets of this reform plan.

Chairman Tom Wheeler

Commissioner Mignon Clyburn
March 6, 2016

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