President-elect Barack Obama clearly committed his administration to deploying broadband to every US residence in a speech last Saturday which was simultaneously broadcast on the radio and over the Web.
“Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m president because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world,” Obama said.
The statement would seem more than empty rhetoric because the campaign is over. He doesn’t need to make promises he can’t keep. On other topics, such as how quickly the economy will improve, Obama has tried to tamp down expectations. However there’s nothing tepid in his statement that “every child should have the chance to get online.”
“We’ll also renew our Information Superhighway,” Obama said, as well as make public buildings more energy-efficient and rebuild the nation’s physical infrastructure – presumably highways, bridges and other forms of public transportation, and possibly schools and libraries.
“It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption,” Obama said, adding that he would not just throw money at any of the problems facing the US economy. Obama promised to make Internet access universal as part of his economic recovery plan.
He said broadband deployment should be taking place faster than it currently is and pledged to work with Congress to pass an economic recovery plan which would accelerate broadband deployment.
The telcos and cablecos dispute the US’ 15th place ranking in broadband deployment. The number comes from a recent OECD report that said the US ranks 15th out of 30 developed countries in overall broadband penetration.
US cablecos and telcos, especially AT&T and Verizon, along with FCC chairman Kevin Martin, argue that wiring the US for broadband is more difficult because the US population is spread out more than in European and Asian countries.
There is even more disagreement on how to increase broadband availability and broadband speeds in the States.
There are two very different matters being discussed:
The first issue is the Digital Divide. How to make broadband, generally acknowledged as 1 Mbps or faster, available to every US residence. “Every” is a tall order because the last 2% to 3% of residences may be in areas so remote that satellite broadband will have to be used rather than wireline or cellular-based broadband.
Some think that the traditional cellcos such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless will have to use cellular technologies like enhanced 3G (HSPA+) and 4G (LTE) to cover the 20% to 25% of residences they cannot reach with their DSL technologies.
The other issue deals with speed. Speeds of at least 50 Mbps are necessary to allow for the live streaming of Internet-delivered HD video to the home.
AT&T and Qwest are the US’ only major digital service providers whose current and planned networks are not capable of speeds of 100 Mbps or greater. Both are committed to building hybrid fiber/copper networks which are capable of about 25 Mbps to most homes.
Verizon is building a fiber network called FiOS capable of up to 100 Mbps. It intends to make FiOS available to about 80% of the homes and businesses that have its phone service. It currently offers 50 Mbps.
The cablecos’ new DOCSIS network technology allows them to upgrade their existing networks up to 100 Mbps or greater. Estimates are that the cablecos can upgrade at a reasonable cost – a $60 modem for each home, something they might ask the government to pay for, plus about $100 per home for the network upgrades. Comcast, the most aggressive cableco at deploying DOCSIS 3.0, offers speeds of 50 Mbps where DOCSIS 3.0 is available.
One complaint of broadband partisans is that no one in Washington, except the lobbyists, seems to understand what broadband is and what deployment involves. The FCC defines an area where broadband is available as any postal code that has even one broadband subscriber.
Both Congress and the FCC have finally started talking about improving the accuracy of the data that’s collected about broadband availability. The current definition of broadband is Internet access at speeds of 0.5 Mbps, a speed that most users would scoff at. Most users sense that broadband is a minimum of 1 Mbps if not 1.5.
Obama’s transition team is reportedly working on programs which would appropriate as much as $2 billion to further build the nation’s broadband network. It’s not certain who would get the money – the existing major service providers, start-ups, new technologies such as Powerline or wireless companies like M2Z Networks, which proposes to use newly available spectrum nicknamed white space to make a basic level of wireless broadband available nationally.
The FCC has been considering whether to add broadband service to the US’ Universal Service Fund, which is a government-mandated, telco-funded subsidy of rural telecommunications to underserved communities, paid for by putting a few cents on every phone call. FCC Chairman Martin, as reported last week, is proposing the use of white-space spectrum to provide basic free wireless Internet access.
Under the white-space initiative, the FCC would license device manufacturers to make devices like PCs that could access the white-space spectrum.
The new administration, however, faces a dilemma. Obama has called for legislation that would provide for Net neutrality. If enacted, it would prohibit broadband service providers from regulating traffic on their networks.
Several telcos and cablecos have said that as few as 5% of their subscribers take up as much as 80% of the networks’ bandwidth. AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are testing ways to reduce the so-called bandwidth hogs from using so much bandwidth that they slow other subscribers’ access speeds.
Broadband service providers say that Net neutrality legislation could discourage broadband deployments that would reduce the digital divide and bring maximum speeds to as many consumers as feasible.