By Johnny Kampis

As providers continue to find it challenging to hire enough workers to fulfill the needs of the broadband infrastructure boom, it’s all the more important that governments do not use taxpayer funding to overbuild networks.

While supply chain disruptions have affected many industries, including high-speed internet projects, less examined is how the shortage in qualified workers is harming the ability of providers to extend infrastructure and close the digital divide at the speed they’d prefer.

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said at a recent investor conference that the company has “thousands of unfilled positions.”

“There is no labor pool there,” he said. “For all the construction that has to be done, there is no skilled labor force that’s currently out there doing it that can be repurposed. It has to be built and trained.”

CEO of Ohio-based Horizon, Jim Capuano told Fierce Telecom that supply chain problems are the biggest issue in telecom right now, but staffing shortages are a close second. “I believe it will be the limiting factor for many of us in terms of how [many networks] we can create,” he said.

With the US in the midst of perhaps its greatest push toward near-universal broadband – and the Department of Commerce estimating that more than US$42 billion will be spent in the near term – many internet providers are undertaking large expansion projects and finding there aren’t enough workers to go around.

Senior research fellow with a focus on telecom at the Mercatus Center, Brent Skorup told the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) that worker shortages were an issue before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now, with so much relief money targeted toward broadband, that problem will only grow worse.

“What was a serious problem is now a much bigger problem for the telecom industry, and I think rural areas in particular,” Skorup said.

Skorup served on the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband deployment advisory committee while Ajit Pai chaired the commission, and says that there was good work done on workforce training in that industry. But that committee has now dissolved and Skorup said broadband deployment will face the same issues that other industries are dealing with in the modern economy.

“Contractors will be competing for the same small pool of skilled employees,” he said. “I fear once all of the federal dollars start going out you’re going to find you can’t staff up even if you have the money.”

It certainly won’t help if overbuilding occurs, which seems likely given the incredibly large pot of taxpayer money being doled out across the country. TPA previously reported on the various federal programs used to boost broadband funding in the coming years. When more funds are available to bureaucrats, waste inevitably occurs.

Of great concern to taxpayers is the emphasis by the Biden administration on the availability of money to local governments for the construction of municipal broadband, which TPA has repeatedly pointed out is bad business. In many cases, the infrastructure for such networks largely runs alongside the existing fiber of incumbent providers in an effort to reach a small percentage of local residents who are unserved.

Skorup notes that programs like the US Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect developed a point system for doling out grants and loans, and points are awards for such categories as being a municipal provider, following prevailing wage standards (hard for rural areas) and abiding by net neutrality standards.

“It signals administration priorities and where this funding is going to go,” Skorup said.

If the Biden administration truly wants to close the digital divide, it shouldn’t skew the system for picking winners and losers for the federal broadband funding. Efforts such as fixed wireless, as one example, can serve very rural areas without costly duplication of fiber infrastructure. That would free up more taxpayer money to help those most in need.

Johnny Kampis is director of telecom policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.