The FCC has been trickling out information about the contents of its National Broadband Plan over the past few weeks. Earlier today, it released the 6 page executive summary [pdf, 888 KB]. The report is scheduled for release Tuesday.
During a number of the consultation sessions, I got the impression that many of the speakers were confusing access to broadband with access to basic connectivity. For example, during the small business session, some speakers talked about benefits of having a website or a web storefront, neither of which need broadband at all. You want to make sure your web host is powerfully connected to multiple networks, but that doesn’t require a lot of power in the umbilical to the ‘net.
In reading the goals in the Executive Summary, I was disappointed that one of the 6 items to be tracked “as a compass” over the next decade is:
To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.
Why do we need broadband for this? Isn’t this a low bandwidth application? How many bits per second do you think it takes to tell you about your water, electricity and natural gas flow? How many bits do you think it takes to send a message to dial down the air conditioner or turn off the water? I was able to do this with a Radio Shack X-10 system and a touch tone phone nearly 30 years ago. Maybe I am confused.
Once the FCC realized that home health care won’t justify 100Mbps service, the regulator must have been looking for some other application that would appeal to the Democratic agenda. After all, how many of us are going to buy a Binford 9000 MRI machine to generate the high resolution images to transmit to Radiologists-R-Us for diagnosis? Instead, let’s set a goal to enable all Americans to have remote access to watching the meters on the side of their house – in high definition, no less! Of course, as I wrote before, earlier FCC consultations were equally modest in saying that broadband enables the IRS to save money with e-filing of tax returns, another low bitrate application.
This isn’t the only place that the Executive Summary fails to inspire. The FCC has set a bold vision for bringing affordable 100 Mbps service to 100 M households, the majority of American households. But for the rest of America, the plan falls short. Over the next 10 years, the FCC wants to have 4 Mbps service universally available. That’s it. 4 Mbps to the hinterlands after another decade of subsidy.
There is much to applaud from what is rumoured to be in the FCC’s plan to be released tomorrow. For example, it is encouraging to see the drive to improve digital literacy.
Maybe the executive summary doesn’t do the plan justice. I hope to find greater inspiration in the full document.
On Tuesday June 8, The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit will be featuring panels looking at International Perspectives on ICT Strategies and progress on the development of Canada’s National Digital strategy.
Have you registered yet?
The applications you describe would probably benefit more from the always-on component of broadband than the top speed. We could probably both come up with better examples than these in the executive summary. It’s a bit premature to claim the plan ‘misses’. We’ll have to wait until the plan is actually released.