The Affordable Connectivity Program will officially go offline on Saturday, leaving more than 23 million American households facing an imminent increase in monthly broadband expenses.The FCC announced the ACP’s expiration on Friday after months of pleas by Biden administration officials for Congress to renew funding for the program that had taken $30 off the broadband bills of qualifying lower-income households since the end of 2021. In February, the FCC stopped taking ACP signups and warned that the remaining money allotted to the program by 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would not allow full benefits for qualifying households after April. By cutting the ACP’s standard $30 subsidy to $14, the commission was able to stretch that funding through May.The ACP, which replaced an earlier pandemic support program, reached far more people than the less generous Lifeline program that the FCC still operates thanks to a more open set of criteria. Household incomes up to 200% of federal poverty guidelines qualified for the ACP’s $30 discount (raised to $75 on qualifying Tribal lands), as did participating in Medicaid or having a child who received free or reduced-cost school lunches.The government paid those subsidies directly to providers, relieving the need for recipients to wait for a monthly stipend to arrive. For people using internet providers that took the Biden administration up on its invitation to roll out $30 plans, the ACP made broadband free. A total of 23,269,550 households had signed up for ACP benefits by the time enrollment closed, which Biden officials regularly said represented one in every six Americans. Internet providers also called on Congress to renew the program—sometimes in the same talks in which industry executives denounced the FCC’s revived net-neutrality rules—but multiple bipartisan bills introduced in the House and Senate to do that went nowhere. In a statement posted Friday, the White House highlighted commitments from 15 internet providers—including AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon—that combine to cover 10 million ACP households to offer $30 or less plans without data caps through the end of 2024.
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The largest among them, Comcast, announced in a post Friday that ACP recipients could switch to its income-restricted Internet Essentials program, which offers 50Mbps downloads for $9.95 a month, but also touted the company’s new, no-data-cap Now Internet prepaid plans, which start at $30/month for 100Mbps downloads without any income limits.The White House’s statement held out hope that Congress might yet breathe life back into this program, as did a Friday post from the FCC’s chair.“No effort has ever done more, faster to close our digital divide than the Affordable Connectivity Program,” Jessica Rosenworcel wrote. “The ACP was too impactful and has too much support from both parties on Capitol Hill and across the country to just move on and say it was nice while it lasted.”
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