Wire a Broadband Stimulus

This week, the Federal Communications Commission will begin designing a plan for improving broadband access and speeds for all Americans. The comment period for how to spend taxpayer funds on the project, which includes $7.2 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, opens Wednesday; the final plan is due next February.

But as Mark Lloyd pointed out last week on Science Progress, before the government deploys billions to expand broadband infrastructure, it would be useful to have a working definition of what exactly we mean by the term. His recommendation is to design a process for an evolving definition that ensures consumers can send and receive high speed high-quality transmissions:

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 [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] 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.

In addition to incomplete definitions for communications technologies, there is also inadequate geographic information on broadband penetration across the country, a problem raised at a hearing last week. Lloyd examined the serious shortcomings of the data gathered by the NTIA last year, and noted that relying on industry numbers for access in large regions is problematic: “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. And 200 kilobits per second in one direction is not advanced telecommunications service.”

Effective, ubiquitous broadband is a crucial driver of economic growth, and without it, U.S. competitiveness suffers on the global stage, as these broadband rankings from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation indicate:

Tags: broadband, Internet

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