COMMUNICATIONS

Much Ado About Broadband

Yes, It’s Important, But Let’s Define What We Mean

The good news is the National Telecommunications Information Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture held a series of public meetings on how to spend $7.2 billion designated in President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package to improve Americans’ access to broadband. The bad news is that stimulus money will be spent before we have a comprehensive national broadband plan and before we even have a good idea of where advanced telecommunications services are unavailable.

The importance of broadband to our nation’s future was clear during the first hearings on the matter, which were held on March 10 by NTIA and USDA to discuss how these funds would be spent. Many members of the public had to be turned away because even the overflow rooms of the cavernous Department of Commerce building where NTIA resides were inadequate to hold the crowd. If you had access to broadband you could watch and even submit questions to the meeting on line. Unfortunately, millions of Americans do not have access to a broadband service that would have allowed them to join in conversation with their government over the Internet.

The critical challenge facing NTIA and USDA, however, was apparent at the second meeting on March 19, where the two agencies sought to define broadband. I was asked to participate in that panel. We were not talking about funding, just the rules, which is why there were no overflow crowds.

The FCC’s website provides two descriptions of broadband. One description generally mirrors the broad capability standard Congress offered in 1996: “advanced communications systems capable of providing high-speed transmission of services such as data, voice, and video over the Internet and other networks.” Two important concepts are missing here that Congress included in its original legislation:

• Users should be able to receive and send high speed transmissions.
• The transmissions should be high quality.

Both of these distinctions are obviously very important for anyone using broadband.

The other description dates from the widely criticized compromise the Federal Communications Commission struck with the telecommunications industry in 1999, which defined broadband as “data transmission speeds exceeding 200 kilobits per second (kbps) . . . in at least one direction.” If we stuck with that definition, it is not clear a citizen could effectively engage with the public panels on the broadband stimulus.

I suggested on the panel that Congress mostly got the broad definition correct in 1996, but that the FCC interpretation of 200 kbps in one direction was wrong then and has not gotten better with age. I argued that the role of government was to set policy and spur the telecommunications markets to speed deployment of the fastest broadband possible, and that while standards should evolve with time NTIA needed to set a hard speed target for what qualifies as a broadband service today.

I then recommended a process for NTIA to set that hard speed target. First it should determine the critical educational, health care and public safety applications, and then it should appoint a panel of independent engineers—perhaps the directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation—to determine the speeds necessary for all Americans to manage these critical applications regardless of where they live and work.

Let’s allow the experts to decide quickly what is broadband today, and then bring them back every two years and come up with another definition. Broadband delivery is bound to improve, so we should establish a process to recognize evolving standards to fit new technological realities. The one thing NTIA should not do is what the FCC has been doing since 1996. It should not call broadband whatever is easiest for most telecommunications providers to achieve today.

The FCC, however, should be given credit for surveying telecommunications providers to collect information about speeds greater than 200 kbps, creating seven-speed tiers. This begins to allow us to understand the full range of speeds being deployed in the United States. Alas, seven-speed tiers did not prevent the FCC from reporting to Congress in the summer of 2008 that “broadband is being deployed to All Americans.” This was not at all supported by the evidence. More should be expected of our expert agencies.

Indeed, a month after the FCC assured Congress that broadband was being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported on a survey it conducted with about 1,200 people, noting that: “Some 55 percent of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home.” That certainly debunks the FCC’s cheerful conclusion, but the bigger problem is the Pew interviewees had no real idea what kind of service they had except that it was better than dial-up.

In 2007, John Peha writing for Brookings Institution, reported that: “Roughly one-third of households in rural America cannot subscribe to broadband Internet services at any price.” And the Government Accountability Office says the federal government doesn’t know whether Native American households on tribal lands can access Internet service at any speed because no one has tracked this information. The fact is we don’t really know who has advanced telecommunications services in the United States because our information is just not good enough.

What we do know, despite a few dissenters, is our country is behind far too many of our global competitors in making available advanced telecommunications services. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation provides an excellent annual chart that shows why “the United States is behind in broadband deployment, speed and price . . . and its rank has been falling since 2001.”

While there is general agreement that the United States is behind many of our global competitors, it is difficult to agree on a course of action in the absence of hard data. As Senator Inouye (D-HI) has said, “We cannot manage what we do not measure.”

Seven billion dollars is a lot of money, but it is no where near enough money to ensure that all Americans have access to advanced telecommunications service. Here is what the $7 billion is designed to accomplish:

• The FCC will develop a broadband plan for the United States
• The Department of Agriculture with its $2.5 billion share of the broadband stimulus money will focus on broadband in rural America and expand the already substantial telecommunications support they provide to this largely overlooked part of our country
• The bulk of the money is going to NTIA to establish a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program to develop and expand broadband services to rural and underserved areas and improve access to broadband by public safety agencies. Of the $4.7 billion to NTIA, $250 million is dedicated to “innovative programs that encourage sustainable adoption of broadband services” and up to $350 million is designated for the development and maintenance of statewide broadband inventory maps.

This is a worthy division of labor, except that one of the most important goals of the stimulus funding for broadband is to create jobs—and soon. It is entirely possible, indeed it is very likely that before these statewide broadband maps are ready, before we have a good handle on where the need is greatest, and before we have a national plan, the money for innovation will be spent.

“Ready, Fire, Aim” is not good policy.

Many are convinced the Obama administration can do better than this. We hope when the FCC has developed our national broadband plan, and the NTIA has a strong sense of where truly advanced telecommunications services are, there will be useful lessons to draw on from this current round of funding. Those lessons should include how to best spend the stimulus money to promote high-speed, two-way broadband deployment that enables the use of health, education and public safety applications.

Then, by 2010, we will have a much better idea about how to get the United States back on track in deploying and upgrading our national telecommunications infrastructure.

Mark Lloyd is an affiliate professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a member of the board of advisors to Science Progress.

Tags: broadband

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