A Narrow “Series of Tubes” Slows Economic Progress

Did Gmail rustle your feathers this week with a repeated “service error”? If a small kink in email access can cause such an uproar, imagine the impact of a significant clog in the series of “tubes” connecting our information highway. National defense, health, and education systems are vulnerable to disruptions in the communication infrastructure, and without a federal commitment to a national broadband policy, we are left to fear the worst. “We are the only industrialized nation without a national policy to promote universal, high-speed Internet access—and it shows,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America Tuesday in a press release announcing a report on the widening gap between broadband speeds in the United States and other wealthy countries. The full results of the survey, along with data at the national, state, and county levels, is available at the Speed Matters project site.

In part because of failed Bush administration tech policy, the United State has not seen significant increases broadband speeds in recent years. As a nation, our current median data download speed is 2.3 megabits per second—Japan boasts 63 mbps (2739 percent higher than the United States), Korea 49 mbps (1739 percent higher), and France 17 mbps (739 percent higher). Advertisements for internet connection providers would make us believe otherwise, showing us that we can now download MP3s at rates faster than ever before.

Mark Lloyd, Vice President of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, explained the irony of the situation earlier this year on Science Progress, noting that our global competitors are outpacing the United States by implementing policies similar to our own from the 1990s. The Clinton administration encouraged public/private telecommunications partnerships, connected schools and libraries to the World Wide Web, and allowed competitive service providers onto the networks of the local telephone monopolies in an effort to speed up the deployment of broadband around most of the nation. Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has implemented policy increasing the number of subscriber lines, but not necessarily the locations of them.

Under Bush administration policy, the possibility of closing of the digital divide remains an impossibility. A substantial rise in subscriber lines is not a good indicator of deployment because multiple subscriber lines are used in large businesses. As Lloyd goes on to explain, Bush’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration does not even have useful indicators because it collects information with minimal geographical details. “Declaring that access is accomplished when the industry reports that one entity in that zip-code has service does not tell us who has broadband,” writes Lloyd.

Without a national broadband policy, he also notes that America grows less competitive in a global economy, and, as he argued in his “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy” report, vulnerable to and ill-prepared for real threats to our national security—another irony, as improved security was the one of the initial rationales behind U.S. government investment in the development of the Internet.

Tags: Internet

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