Congress Seeks to Create Standard to Ensure Rural Wireless is Comparable to Urban

March 20, 2018

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold a debate March 22 on a measure to establish a national standard for determining if rural mobile and broadband services are comparable to services provided in urban areas.

The ‘‘Rural Reasonable and Comparable Wireless Access Act of 2017’’ would instruct the FCC to develop regulations that establish a national standard for determining whether commercial mobile service, commercial mobile data service, and broadband internet access service available in rural areas are reasonably comparable to those services provided in urban areas.

To do that the commission would gather data on average signal strengths and average speeds of commercial mobile service and on average speeds of broadband internet access service in the 20 most populous metropolitan statistical areas. The standard would specify that rural commercial mobile data service is reasonably comparable to urban service only if the average signal strengths and average speeds meet or exceed the MSA averages.