FCC’s broadband goals aren’t ambitious enough

The FCC recently announced the National Broadband Plan, a set of six goals the bureau will aspire to realize over the next several years:

1. At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.
2. The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.
3. Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.
4. Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as school, hospitals, and government buildings.
5. To ensure the safety of American communities, every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network.
6. 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.

In order to achieve the goals, the FCC says that it will:

• Design policies to ensure robust competition and, as a result, maximize consumer welfare, innovation and investment.
• Ensure efficient allocation and management of assets government controls or influences, such as spectrum, poles, and rights-of-way, to encourage network upgrades and competitive entry.
• Reform current universal service mechanisms to support deployment of broadband and voice in high-cost areas; and ensure that low-income Americans can afford broadband; and in addition, support efforts to boost adoption and utilization.
• Reform laws, policies, standards and incentives to maximize the benefits of broadband in sectors government influences significantly, such as public education, health care and government operations.

But is it too little, too strange, too late?

Doin’ it right

Goal two states that the US should lead the world in mobile innovation. It’s a worthy goal: mobile data and internet usage is spiking as people increasingly insist on getting all of the latest emails, tweets and more streamed right to their mobile. Internet radio, YouTube and augmented-reality applications, meanwhile, continue to strain our networks; there simply has to be a bigger, faster network for continued growth of the mobile sector.

The recent LTE tests from the major carriers indicate some progress here, but with an initial rollout expected to cover only about a third of the population, it’s still going to take years to build the kind of network the Plan here is requesting.

Goal four pushes companies to provide 1Gbps connections to anchor institutions like schools, hospitals and government buildings. This is definitely good news–and about time–for our schools, which too often languish on a connection too slow to support the tasks being asked of it. Faster connections will allow richer interactivity for online demonstrations, faster navigation to improve the pace of classes and more effective options during class research and study.

Faster connections between schools can allow long-distance e-learning, where a special guest at one school can be streamed into many so all can share the knowledge. Anchor connections at and between hospitals, too, will become more and more critical as hospitals continue move into electronic medical records, improve interoperability and begin the task of reconciling patient databases against each other.

Technologies that let patients schedule appointments or converse with their doctors online from the comfort of their homes could improve wait times to see the doctor and the doctor’s efficiency at seeing patients during his workday.

Studies conducted across multiple institutions can make use of fast transport links between these major hubs as well. Government institutions with faster connections can host centralized sites such as Britain’s new proposed initiative, which gives everybody in the country a personal website where they can do all of their government work: renewing licenses, passport applications, paying tickets, etc.

Goal five pushes for a nationwide first-responder network to improve public safety. While I’m left wondering if this will be some kind of cellular ARPANET reserved only for federal or state emergency crews, there are certainly worse goals to have. Better communication in the aftermaths of 9/11 or Katrina may have saved additional lives.

With cyber warfare on the rise, having a separate (more protected?) network for emergency response is one more thing would-be attackers have to compete against, and it could be an additional layer of redundancy for other catastrophes or major outages. It may be a goal that’s a little odd, but it has some decent logic behind it.

Doin’ it wrong

Goal one pushes the country to make 100Mb down/50Mb up connections available to 100 million homes. It might sound sexy, but it’s not ambitious enough. Countries across the pond have already deployed DOCSIS 3.0 and are planning upgrades to 120Mb down/30Mb up in the next year or two, never mind the next decade or two.

The Plan suggests 50Mb down/20Mb up as a good target five years out, but that is already worse than average in Japan (61Mbps down) and only slightly ahead of South Korea (46Mbps). Oh, and they both pay less than us on average–as do about 20 other countries.

The other part of this that’s unfortunate is that the Plan only pushes for these speeds for 100 million homes, or a third of today’s population, and less than that in 10 years. By 2020, the US better be far beyond 100/50, because I think much of the rest of the world will be.

Goal three, finally, does it wrong by failing to define a speed at all. It simply states that every American should have affordable access to broadband, with no definition for what level of speed that broadband service should offer. Though it will almost certainly change, the current FCC definition of broadband is 768Kbps, a number so painfully small that it can hardly be considered broadband today, much less in a decade. Leaving such a figure open to interpretation is just begging for underwhelming speeds.

Doin’ it… strange

Goal six is the oddest one of the bunch: It recommends that every American, in real time, be able to check their power consumption via the Internet. In a strange cross-pollination of agendas, the Plan injects a dose of energy independence rhetoric into a manifesto meant to increase broadband adoption. The elaborate explanation detailed in “Chapter 2” spells it out even more clearly:

America can no longer rely on fossil fuels and imported oil. To improve national security, reduce pollution and increase national competitiveness, the United States must lead, not follow, in the clean energy economy. Encouraging renewable power, grid storage and vehicle electrification are important steps to improve American energy independence and energy efficiency; to enable these technologies at scale, the country will need to modernize the electric grid with broadband and advanced communications.

The idea here is, of course, that if people know how much they’re using and where they’re using it the most, they’ll cut back. While it’s a valid (and scientifically-upheld) point, it doesn’t really mesh with a document that’s meant to outline specific ways to get America into the lead in the communications market. I suppose there are worse goals to throw in here on a whim–at least they aren’t recommending everybody buy an electric car…

Not with a bang, but a whimper

The National Broadband Plan will not suddenly transform America into a lush technoscape, but it sets moderate goals that, with time, can be achieved.

Ultimately, the plan is designed to wean us off of high-priced, over-sold broadband and wean the providers off of their old equipment and practices, drawing all of us into a more connected community. Will it be successful? As with all things, it depends on enforcement.

Does the FCC have the legal capabilities to enforce these guidelines, or will they be as toothless as failing to define “broadband?” Will the providers embrace the challenge, looking to be the ones crowing “first!”, or will they, as they are so wont to do, kick and scream and drag their feet, trying to maintain the status quo they’ve worked so hard to achieve?

Hopefully a whimper will be enough. Then again, maybe somebody will have to provide a bang.