While the challenges of closing the digital divide are vast and complex, one telecommunications expert told Capitol Hill lawmakers this week that artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to expand broadband services to every corner of the nation.
But first, Congress must pass comprehensive AI legislation.
“The challenges we face in securing our telecommunications supply chain are vast and complex,” Sameh Yamany, the chief technology officer of VIAVI Solutions, said during a House Energy and Commerce Committee Communications and Technology Subcommittee hearing on Nov. 14. Yamany said VIAVI is transforming communications networks using AI.
“AI, like many significant technological advancements that have come before it, necessitates a discussion of regulations and guidelines to safeguard its operation and ensure security, safety, privacy, and impartiality,” Yamany said. “But no two AI technologies are equivalent and each carry different risks, impacts and implications.”
“As the committee continues its pivotal work on AI, we urge you to embrace the nuanced nature of AI systems, particularly those offered by VIAVI – low risk, high value AI system like ours, which we termed Telco AI – that present a new frontier enhancing network security, resiliency, and efficiency.”
According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 8.3 million U.S. households lack access to high-speed broadband. With more than 130 Federal programs – administered by 15 agencies – to expand broadband services, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have expressed concern in the past over whether these programs are being administered effectively.
Yamani said that AI must be leveraged to quickly and effectively expand broadband use.
“Using AI will help in understanding where the network capacity can be and efficiently utilize that and you can actually optimize it,” Yamani said. “[AI] is going to provide more innovation that can create a much better cost analysis of where you can bring the spectrum and how you can use it there. Definitely all these AI tools will help create a much better way of distributing the resources of the network and improve a lot of access to broadband services.”
Courtney Lang, Vice President of Policy, Trust, Data, and Technology at the Information Technology Industry Council, told lawmakers that AI can be used to enhance broadband mapping – a years-long challenge for the FCC.
“One of the really interesting use cases for AI is around broadband mapping and this is something that can be done more accurately and more precisely with the integration of artificial intelligence,” Lang said. “For example, we have some broadband maps now, but AI can be used to help enhance those and in certain cases, it can actually see from the data particular buildings that perhaps are without broadband access, even within a community and that can help to more quickly and effectively extend broadband and internet service to those populations.”
The FCC’s mapping revamp effort is a work long in progress, mandated by Congress, and crucial to government decisions about where to devote Federal funding to areas of the country that are deemed to be unserved or underserved by providers. The FCC released pre-production versions of its national broadband maps in November 2022.
Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, emphasized that AI can be useful in closing the digital divide, but not without the necessary data – which has proven to be lacking in rural areas.
“We have to close the digital divide or our conversations on artificial intelligence use are just going to be null and void because people will be left behind,” Turner Lee said. “We’ve heard that AI can be very useful in helping us to gather the necessary data when it comes to broadband access – where they’re located and used, in terms of management of those assets, and how we’re deploying them in very efficient matters.”
“We also still have to be careful that we may not have enough data, when you think about rural communities where the scarcity of data exists, the extent to which the AI will be effective and giving some true portrayal of assets there will be something that we’ll have to go back and interrogate,” she continued, adding, “As we go into using AI in critical government functions and in areas where the value of data matters, we also have to check and make sure that the function of that data or the historical condition of that data is not going to be one that will put us back as opposed to forward.”
