Eight Steps to a National Broadband Strategy
As a nation that prides itself on technology leadership, it’s mystifying why the U.S. doesn’t have a clear, well-planned strategy and supporting policies for broadband. No matter what your personal beliefs are as to whether As a nation that prides itself on technology leadership, it’s mystifying why the U.S. doesn’t have a clear, well-planned strategy and supporting policies for broadband. No matter what your personal beliefs are as to whether the federal government or market forces should actually provide tomorrow’s high-speed networks, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the lack of a coherent plan for how the country will use bandwidth to enhance its citizens’ lives, and maintain its competitiveness in world markets, is a huge problem.
Why is such a strategy important? Because the U.S. is lagging, rapidly, and every day that goes by without a plan for providing ubiquitous broadband means the country falls that much more behind. A national vision and a set of standards, coupled with funding for critical interconnections, would provide the structure and incentives for states and local municipalities to create the right market conditions for comprehensive broadband networks.
But don’t we already have “national broadband”? After all, recent studies suggest that 78% of all households in the U.S. have Internet access faster than dialup; doesn’t that mean the work is largely done? The answer is a vociferous “No” – unless you think 1 megabit per second is “broadband.”
Truth is, we’ve been conditioned to accept a slightly larger straw as fast connectivity. We need to continually look overseas to find out what real broadband is and can be. In Paris, for example, a friend told me he’s recently been offered a 100 megabit per second Internet connection for approximately $60 a month. And France Telecom is trialing a 2.5 gigabit per second offering. How soon would you guess this kind of service would be available in a major portion of the U.S., without some kind of “moon shot” vision?
To help move the dialog along, Jim Baller and Casey Lide of the Baller Herbst Law Group have posted a paper, “Eight Bold Steps To A National Broadband Strategy,” which offers a series of ideas for making such a strategy happen. Beginning with “Create a critical mass of support for a national broadband strategy” (amazing that this doesn’t yet exist), and ending with “Obtain legislation to implement the national broadband strategy,” the paper suggests the major phases that must happen if a real strategy is to appear.
Download the paper, and tell us what you think. Is this the right set of steps? What’s missing, or should be done differently? How can we make sure this happens?
gB
Related posts:
Loading ...
Gary, I’ve been researching this topic since 1998, but the U.S. hasn’t made much progress since that time. Perhaps it’s a moot point, and we should just wait until the country’s ITU ranking drops to 20th worldwide (or thereabouts).
Sometimes it takes a real crisis and associated awakening to move a nation’s leadership to substantive action. FYI, along time ago I wrote a paper entitled “Broadband Policy: Lessons Learned, The U.S. Interstate Highway System.”
http://geocities.com/dhdeans/comm5.html
This topic is now old news, and frankly I doubt that yet another ‘paper’ will make any substantive difference. It’s an issue in search of meaningful political leadership. IMHO, this may be a lost cause, at least for the time being. The U.S. hasn’t hit rock bottom, but it should relatively soon.
The upshot of having no national broadband strategy is that our communications future ‚Äì the way we will speak with each other for the next hundred years ‚Äì is getting worked out at the local, municipal level. Conversely, each one of these cities is a critical laboratory not just for their outcomes, but also for their processes. I’d hate to see a national blue-ribbon commission on broadband repeat the mistakes of some of the local task forces, like Philadelphia or San Francisco.