Posts Tagged ‘National Broadband Plan’
Case Closed: Why Most Of Usa Lacks 100mbps ‘Net Connections
Excitement about the approach of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, due March 17, is inspiring ever more dramatic calls for greater high-speed Internet connectivity in the United States. This month, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski declared that the agency wants 260 million Americans hooked up to 100 Mbps broadband by 2020. Not to be outdone, the Media and Democracy Coalition says that by that same year consumer access to “world-class networks” should equal the present rate of telephone adoption (90%+).
As these calls for ever higher benchmarks reach a fever pitch, it’s worth remembering some of the grand proclamations of yesteryear. Take, for example, the TechNet group’s 2002 recommendation that the government should commit to a goal of 100 Mbps to 100 million homes and small businesses by the end of the decadein other words, now. The consortium included CEOs and executives from Cisco, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard.
Principle number one, they declared, was that the US “should foster innovation and reduce regulationsespecially with respect to broadband applications and services.”
But in case you didn’t notice, 100Mbps x 100 million didn’t happen. About 75 to 77 million Americans currently access some kind of broadband, according to the latest data. That’s only assuming, however, that you accept 200Kbps as a flavor of “high speed Internet.” And a huge chunk of the population (over 30 percent) never go online at allless because they’re retired and not interested; more often because they can’t afford the prices.
So why this shortfall of progress, especially compared to other countries? Some argue that everything is going fine. The US is just too spread out, that’s alland we’ll catch up in due time. Others contend that we just haven’t spent enough government or private sector money on the problem. But the big thesis these days is that we missed the boat by curtailing wholesale network access to the big telcos and cable ISPs. By making it more expensive for smaller providers to link to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, or Time Warner Cable in order to build out their own middle-mile systems, the government condemned most consumers to two ISP choices, at best.
The FCC’s own recently commissioned study by Harvard’s Berkman Center declared that “there is extensive evidence to support the position, adopted almost universally by other advanced economies, that open access policies, where undertaken with serious regulatory engagement, contributed to broadband penetration, capacity, and affordability in the first generation of broadband.”
We’re not going to categorically proclaim that this is indeed the solution to the nation’s broadband woes. But there’s no question that the policy of the FCC for the last dozen years has been to make it more expensive and even harder for businesses and competitive service providers to get Internet or telephone access (which are increasingly the same thing) at regulated rates.
When the FCC announced it was letting Berkman do that survey, the Commission’s National Broadband Plan coordinator Blair Levin declared that in so doing, the agency didn’t want to “reinvent the wheel.” But let’s hold onto that wheel metaphor and review the extent to which the US has rolled back open access over the last dozen years. As you’ll see, on just about every available platform, businesses, smaller telcos, and alternative ISPs have been given a back seat to the game.
Dedicated access
In 1996, when Congress passed its Telecommunications Act, everybody was jazzed about the dot-com boom. Policy makers assumed that investors would pour capital into building out the nation’s middle mile broadband capacity, making it affordable for big corporations and wireless companies to rent lines for enterprise computing and backhaulthe circuits that link cell phone towers to network switches.
Sprint told us the company pays something like seven times for one of the thousands of special access lines it needs than what consumers pay for a single, much faster residential broadband account.
Instead, the boom fizzled. The FCC, however, kept working under the assumption that deregulation would encourage the construction of more capacity. It issued an order that gave the green light to the dismantling of “special access” price caps under certain conditions. If enough access-creating telecommunications infrastructure had “aggregated” or “colocated” in an urban area with more than 50,000 peoplethe agency would regard this as a sign of significant competition and lift price caps.
In addition, in 2000 the big carriers asked for, and got, yearly reductions in price cap levels based on agreed-upon percentages: three percent in 2000, and 6.5 percent for the next three years. Four incumbentsAT&T, BellSouth, QWest, and Verizonreceived full price deregulation in over 100 major metropolitan areas. One of those companies, BellSouth, is now part of AT&T.
But five years later, the Government Accountability Office did an audit of 16 metropolitan areas and found very few signs of growth in facilities-based competition, signs of its shrinkage, and higher special access prices in various cities. And the GAO concluded that the FCC “does not regularly monitor and measure the development of competition, which will affect how FCC responds to emerging trends, and the actions it takes to encourage and foster such competition.”
Fast forward to now, and Sprint told us the company pays something like seven times for one of the thousands of special access lines it needs than what consumers pay for a single, much faster residential broadband account. Meanwhile, a report issued last year concluded that special access charges now represent a huge chunk of incumbent telco business. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners found that in 1996, interstate special access represented less than five percent of Qwest’s, Verizon’s, and AT&T’s total revenue. In 2007 they represented almost 30 percent of Qwest’s, nearly 25 percent of Verizon’s, and close to a fifth of AT&T’s.
Source: arstechnica.com
Fcc: Open Schools To Community Internet Use
The Federal Communications Commission has recommended a host of ways that the government can help make broadband more useful to Americans when it comes to health care, energy costs, and jobs. And new rules enacted by the agency will let thousands of public schools open their Internet facilities to the public.
“Broadbands ability to improve lives goes far beyond a strictly ‘educational’ context,” noted Commissioner Mignon Clyburn during Thursday’s Open Commission FCC meeting. “Computer terminals at public access points that sit dormant waste an important opportunity to help members of the public search for jobs.”
Clyburn was referring to an Order that will let schools that participate in the FCC’s E-Rate computer equipment funding program open their doors to Internet seekers during non-operating hours. Right now, K-12s that take E-Rate money for equipment and broadband connectivity can only offer those resources to their students. That means that these facilities go unused on evenings, weekends, and during summer breaks.
Now schools that permit community access can share their networked computers with job seekers, students enrolled in digital literacy programs, and people who need to access government services online. The ruling comes in the form of a waiver of the FCC’s requirement that E-Rate recipients only use these funds for educational purposes. The Order will last through the E-Rate funding year, up until June 30, 2011. But schools have to promise that they won’t request more E-Rate money than they need for their students, will only open their Internet doors when students are out of school, and won’t sell their facilities to anyone.
No backdoors
“The change in our rules should not inadvertently put an increased demand on the E-Rate program,” warned Commissioner Robert M. McDowell. “It should not provide a backdoor way for schools to request more funds than necessary to support their student populations, and any upcoming audits should be designed in a manner to foreclose such actions.”
This expansion of E-Rate facilities was first tried in Alaska. It could take some of the pressure off public libraries, which share their Internet stations with patrons for general use, and have been deluged with job seekers who have no access to broadband anywhere else. But one wonders how many cash-strapped public schools will avail themselves of this change, given that opening up their workstations will require them to spend additional money on access supervisors and technical support.
Nonetheless, the move won praise from Representative Edward Markey (D-MA), who has a bill in the House that would allow E-Rate to fund e-Book readers and home broadband connections for low income K-12 kids. Free Press also cheered the announcement, but noted that it falls far short of the reform group’s own recommendations, which include letting schools offer WiFi to local neighborhoods.
Anytime, anywhere
Meanwhile, yet another sneak preview of the agency’s National Broadband Plan surfaced at Thursday’s meeting. The FCC’s broadband National Purposes Update didn’t mention any of the big regulatory recommendations that it will make to Congress when the plan is unveiled on March 17. But the document did offer a laundry list of ways that government could make broadband more useful for the public. These include:
Setting up a broadband powered “national employment assistance platform,” which would offer the workforce “anytime, anywhere e-learning tools to drive enrollment in post-secondary education and job training programs”
Authorizing the Rural Health Care Program to fund high speed Internet adoption at rural health care facilities, and encouraging the use of remote monitoring vital sign equipment hooked up to the ‘Net
Fast tracking the digitization and accessibility of health care records
Encouraging deployment of smart grid technology, and releasing more government data on digital platforms so that consumers have online access to their energy use records
Creating a nationwide interoperable broadband wireless public safety network.
Some of these proposals are a bit difficult to decipher, e.g., “Improve ability of federal buildings to serve as anchor tenants for unserved and underserved communities.” Will the FCC suggest running fiber lines to federal buildings as a way to jumpstart local ISP activity?
The FCC has been trying to get that interoperable public safety network out the door for quite a while. At present the Commission is tasked by Congress with auctioning off a chunk of spectrum to a private company that will share the bandwidth with public safety agencies. The one and only attempt at that auction failed, and now public safety groups want the agency to allocate that band to them outright, something that Capitol Hill would have to authorize first.
Source: arstechnica.com