National Broadband Plan: Overview (Part I)

by Nicholas Bramble | March 24, 2010 | Other | 1 Comment

The FCC’s National Broadband Plan, released on Tuesday of last week, does a number of interesting things in its 376 pages. This post gives a very brief overview of the plan’s framework for promoting fast, competitive, and nation-wide broadband access. In a later post, I will explore the plan’s specific recommendations in the areas of broadband, education, and copyright.

Many commentators have focused on the Broadband Plan’s 100-squared initiative, which states that by 2020, “[a]t least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second.” The plan outlines three primary mechanisms for achieving this core goal. First, the plan recommends that the government “should make more spectrum available for existing and new wireless broadband providers in order to foster additional wireless-wireline competition at higher speed tiers.” Specifically, the plan states that the FCC “should make 500 megahertz newly available for broadband use within the next 10 years, of which 300 megahertz between 225 MHz and 3.7 GHz should be made newly available for mobile use within five years,” and 120 megahertz of which should be “reallocate[d] … from the broadcast television (TV) bands.” Second, to ensure that both consumers and administrative agencies have sufficient access to data on broadband quality and competition, the FCC’s broadband plan advocates for the collection of “more detailed and accurate data on actual availability, penetration, prices, churn and bundles offered by broadband service providers to consumers and businesses.” Finally, the plan develops numerous recommendations for the modernization of broadband infrastructure, including a suggestion that federal financing of highway and bridge projects should be “contingent on states and localities allowing joint deployment of conduits by qualified parties” and that Congress “should consider enacting ‘dig once’ legislation applying to all future federally funded projects along rights-of-way.” To fund rural access to broadband services, the plan proposes reforming the $9 billion Universal Service Fund through a transition in focus “from yesterday’s analog technologies to tomorrow’s digital infrastructure.”

Yochai Benkler and others have criticized the plan for not focusing sufficiently on how the government might employ more specific pro-competitive interventions such as open access rules in order to achieve these goals, and for setting speed goals that are too low. While acknowledging the importance of these criticisms and the centrality of the question of how to promote faster and more reliable broadband access, I would like to use this post to focus on a few other of the plan’s hundreds of recommendations.

First, besides spectrum allocation and data collection, the plan makes use of a variety of corollary mechanisms for increasing competition and innovation in the broadband ecosystem. To promote the development of a robust market in set-top devices for accessing video and broadband, the Plan seeks to initiate a proceeding requiring broadcasters to install in subscribers’ homes a simple gateway device whose “sole function should be to bridge the proprietary or unique elements of the Multichannel Video Programming Distributors network (e.g., conditional access, tuning and reception functions) to widely used and accessible, open networking and communications standards.” Standardizing consumer access devices in this manner may be crucial to ensuring that users can transport subscription content and applications across all of the many devices they use to access the Internet, and in guarding against the rise of network-particular devices and a balkanized or splintered broadband ecosystem. The implementation of open standards and protocols also helps address the public choice problem at the heart of broadband video access by ensuring that it’s not just a small number of existing device makers and network providers who can articulate a stake in the future of the interface between television and the Internet.

Second, the plan also explores demand-side barriers to greater broadband adoption. For instance, to ensure that people have the skills to use broadband services, the Plan suggests the launch of “a National Digital Literacy Program that creates a Digital Literacy Corps, increases the capacity of digital literacy partners and creates an Online Digital Literacy Portal.” And the plan admirably develops detailed plans for maximizing the ability of persons with disabilities to take part in the broadband ecosystem.

This exploration of demand-side barriers is related to the final of the Plan’s three major sections, which (in response to the request made by Congress in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) seeks to explore how the implementation of broadband access will affect the development of and access to health care, education, energy and the environment, economic opportunity, government performance, civic engagement, and public safety services. It’s these “national purposes”—and particularly on the question of how broadband relates to education—that I’d like to explore in a second post.

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