The Fiber to the Home Council is calling on Congress to make 100 megabits per second the standard in US broadband. Naturally it involves laying out fiber (at least using today’s technology). I would love everyone to have 100 Mbps but the chance of this happening is very low. The FTTH Council wants 100 megabits per second to be universally available in the US by 2015. Like many others, the FTTH Council is appalled that those who do have broadband access can barely get 5 Mbps. But getting Congress to do this is difficult. Remember local loop unbundling in the Telecom Act of 1996? Americans would have had faster cheaper broadband today if only LLU had been enforced.
The PDF document of the Fiber to the Home Council is at:
http://www.ftthcouncil.org/documents/767243.pdf
It is good to see such a comprehensive approach for truly high speed broadband. This is exactly the kind of approach we need.Not only is Fiber to the home a technology that actually provides the speeds needed in the future (100 mbps) but the report suggests an approach for public policy that would support it. We need a public-private partnership to accomplish this kind of build out with ways State and Federal governments to incent investment. An important first step would be to create a comprehensive database to indentify where there are gaps in availability, speed and price. For some more detailed analysis of this kind of approach see http://www.speedmatters.org.
While I honestly believe that this level of speed is the next step that our country needs to move towards, I do not believe it is financially possible using fiber alone. The reality is that there are too many miles of fiber to be laid and too few people to pay for it in most of the US’s geographic area.
I do believe that ultra high speed wireless equipment will make this dream possible but we will need to have several major changes happen first.
First, there will need to be a push from Congress towards this initiative.
Second, there will need to be some serious changes made to the way spectrum is sliced up and supplied to the highest bidder.
Third, assuming the first two conditions are met, we will need the scale of economics to kick in so as to lower the cost of these radios. If these ultra high speed radios can be mass produced in the millions of units per month we might expect to see the price per radio drop somewhere near WiFi range.
It should be pointed out that this would be something that would benefit the entire world – not just the US, even though the US has the most to lose of we do not rise to this challenge.
Respectfully,
Ken DiPietro
NextGenCommunications