US Connectivity Investments Dwarf the Rest of the OECD

A new OECD report on the "Digital Economy Outlook" for 2024 summarized the total investment in "Telecommunications Services" for OECD countries from 2010 to 2023. In this dataset, "telecommunications" includes broadband. Adding up the total investment over the given period provides a dramatic result: The United States dwarfs the rest of the countries in connectivity investment. The United States had $1.1 trillion of investment during the period. The next best country (Japan) had just under $200 billion. OECD's U.S. data stops in 2022, but another estimate of U.S. broadband investment for 2023 put it at $94.7 billion. So, the United States' order-of-magnitude advantage likely grew even more last year. Only 7 OECD countries invested as much from 2010-23 as U.S. broadband providers did in 2023 alone.

Figure 1: Total investment in "telecommunications services" 2010-2023

As handwringing continues over the unprecedentedly large ($42 billion) Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, it's important to recall that private ISPs have invested the equivalent of 2 BEAD programs every year since the BEAD statute was enacted.

This magnitude of investment has paid off as the United States also ranks among the top countries for broadband quality, despite facing greater geographic and demographic challenges than other smaller, more urbanized countries. The United States is also part of another trend in the OECD report of falling real broadband prices.

These ongoing waves of evidence of the benefits of private investment for U.S. connectivity make recent FCC actions that threaten these investments even more baffling. Most notable of these are the FCC's recent attempt to regulate broadband as though it were the old telephone monopoly and to subject broadband providers' every move to a Kafkaesque disparate-impact discrimination regime. These decisions treat the vibrant, competitive broadband market as though it were a stagnant utility monopoly. Not only do these regulations not comport with the current state of the broadband marketplace, but they also threaten to pump the brakes on the very investment that continues to alleviate connectivity gaps. The incoming administration should reverse course and return to promoting America's strength of private broadband investments that fuel networks that support consumers' needs rather than stifling that investment under heavy-handed regulation.