The Freedom to Connect Conference saw calls for a "national broadband strategy" and although it's true that the current non-strategy is failing, it's not clear what would succeed. FCC Commissioner Adelstein shared his hopes for the future.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 23, 2007]

"We can help all of our nation's citizens," said FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein to the Freedom to Connect conference. "We need to establish a real national broadband strategy, one that preserves internet freedoms for everyone, no matter how rich or how poor."

e-rate
Adelstein said that the necessity of the e-rate should be obvious now, but it is not obvious to ISP-Planet. The ideals of the e-rate program are good: provide broadband to those who would not otherwise have the option of purchasing it.

The reality, however, is that the program is riddled with flaws, a subject we have covered for years. Although the program does pay legitimate ISPs doing good work , it is also riddled with fraud.

What the FCC has not done
"We're falling behind our global competitors," Adelstein said. "In other countries, you can get more Mbps for less money."

He said that it's time that the FCC review its definition of broadband. The FCC's definition of broadband remains "data transmission speeds exceeding 200 kilobits per second (Kbps), or 200,000 bits per second, in at least one direction." This is ludicrous.

At ISP-Planet we believe that 1.5 Mbps, the current standard for copper networks, will not be sufficient to meet future demand. We wrote at the end of last year that 1.5 Mbps is "Dialup 2.0".

In June of 2006, the U.S. ranked 12th in the world in subscribers per capita. Furthermore, the U.S. is lagging behind the most advanced nations, such as Korea, Sweden, and Japan, in the rollout of fiber.

What the FCC can do
The FCC needs to produce better data (see Flawed FCC Data Guarantees Flawed Policy) because without that data, the FCC's policies will be misguided. A recent GAO report (.pdf) noted that the FCC admits its data is not intended to be the basis of national policy but argues (footnote 3, page 3), "while FCC states that its zip-code information is not meant to be a measure of broadband deployment, some parties have used it in this manner because there are no other official data on deployment of broadband across the country."

Better data would, we suspect, show that there are more gaps in deployment than the FCC is willing to acknowledge, and that those gaps are in poor and rural areas.

Adelstein said that there's much that Congress can do, including continuing to fund the RUS program (that program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the FCC, and has helped many small rural ISPs and WISPs) and allowing better depreciation rules.

Adelstein was encouraging about municipal deployments. "Some argue that the challenge of rural deployment can be solved by allowing communities to tap their own resources," he said, leaving his own position on the matter unclear.

On new wireless technologies, he was also well informed but very vague, saying that "we need to find ways to allow cognitive radios to reach their full fruition."

Questions and few answers
The question and answer session began with J.S. Snider of The New America Foundation who asked whether the FCC would ever punish a telco. "The FCC has been 99.99 percent carrot versus stick. You gave $50 billion worth of spectrum. . . to incumbents. Sprint promised to [connect] 30 million households, said they would begin a rapid buildout, but they haven't built out anything. They got more spectrum in 2004. Now it's 2007 and they're making more promises. I think they will build, but it's been 8 years. . . of delay after delay. Where's the stick?"

Adelstein admitted, "DC likes to hand out carrots, not sticks. We need to have more accountability."

Another questioner asked about the definition of net neutrality in the decision on the merger between SBC and Bell South. At the time, Dave Burstein of DSL Prime wrote, AT&T's Net Neutrality Offer is Just Hot Air, noting that AT&T had offered to not control only those parts of the network it is not able to control.

Adelstein admitted that the FCC might ignore the agreement and let AT&T do anything. "The Chairman [Kevin Martin] said he will enforce the net neutrality provision. In his statement afterwards, when he said he wouldn't implement some sections. . . I think he was referring to special access. I'm hoping he will enforce net neutrality."

For the moment, our national broadband policy appears to consist of hoping that the FCC will enforce the law and the agreements that it signed as it allowed the creeping re-monopolization of telephony.

ISP-Planet would like to recommend one simple idea: enforce the law. Crack down on false advertising, fraudulent billing, slamming, and other monopoly practices. Most basic of all is this: don't tell the telcos that they don't need to obey their merger agreements. They're supposed to find that out later, after they've violated the agreements with impunity.

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