By Jordan Usdan, Attorney-Advisor, Broadband Task Force
The FCC is making a determined effort to understand the global broadband ecosystem and to extract relevant lessons from the international broadband experience. These efforts have included holding two workshops in partnership with the FCC’s International Bureau: International Lessons and Global Broadband Connects America and the World; visiting or teleconferencing with regulators, academics and companies in over a dozen countries in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America; and posting for comment the Berkman Center’s study of broadband throughout the world. Today the FCC is releasing a companion video with this blog post of short snippets of our trip to Europe.
The task force’s international team recognizes that dozens of countries have already pursued national broadband strategies, with some countries already on their third or fourth effort. These national efforts vary widely, from nationwide publicly funded fiber build-outs to explicit policies against government deployment subsidies. A few things do hold true across borders: governments and companies see Internet connectivity as an essential infrastructure with great promise; the world still looks to the United States for policy and technology leadership; and broadband enables a global ecosystem where technologies, services and content can be accessed at high speeds anytime and anywhere.
It's time to issue a challenge to the FCC to do the right thing.
After months and months of testimony and written submission, the FCC appears to be further way from ensuring Americans will have world-leading access to broadband, than they were before this began.
So far, it appears that the outputs of these proceedings, based on public FCC expressions to date, will define a multitude of processes in lieu of product:
- they will rely on the same market forces that have relegated us to the middle of the pack
- they will focus on subsidizing interest group access (business, police, health, school, disadvantaged, industry, native, etc.) rather than assuring John Q Public high-speed broadband
- they will create a new set of principles as a base for future decisions instead of actions to be implemented
- they will identify a new host of un-ending proceedings.
- they will not, in spite of having the information at hand, plus clear examples of success in other
countries, specify what must be achieved in concrete terms - speed, cost, time, geography - to reach broadband primacy.
Industry can now delay investment pending future outcomes, and will continue cherry-picking markets.
They need not concern themselves that speed of deployment, cost, quality or speed of service will be
dictated by either government standard or real competition.
It appears we will get more of the same, but it could be even slower to come and more costly.
The FCC can easily prove this wrong.
There are over 80 national broadband networks either deployed or in the process of deployment. The most courageous is the Australian National Beoadband Network and after two years of consultations and meetings we don't know what we are going to get. Sorry, we know that it will be a layer 2 FTTP/wireless and satellite network to cover the nation. However the rest of the detail is yet to be communicated to the public. This type of project needs painstaking program planning and cost modeling. So far the Austrlian government is not talking about what the real cost will be in the hope that after it reaches agreement with Telstra, it can presents a nice surprise to the voters. That is, with access to exchanges and ducts the cost of the depolyment should drop from the original $43B quoted. But without knowing how the number ($43B) was reached originally , we can be in for
another surprise and costs a still greater even with the Telstra network available to the NBNCo.
In some cases slience is not golden