FCC National Broadband Plan Workshop: Lessons from the Rest of the World
BY David Isenberg | Wednesday, August 19 2009
We're covering the FCC's on-going series of public workshops as it works to draft a National Broadband Plan. An archive of that coverage can be found here. -- the editors
It has been widely reported that the U.S. has fallen from broadband leadership to fourth in 2002, to twelfth, or sixteenth or 24th today, depending on whose numbers are cited.
But if that's true, it was not obvious at the FCC's International Lessons workshop yesterday.
To at least one of the Workshop's experts, Jeffrey Eisenach, the U.S. already had a very high level of wireline and wireless facilities-based competition, this competition is serving the United States well, and the metrics that indicate a broadband leadership problem are "fraught with problems . . . and prone to misuse."
To another invited expert, Rob Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, national broadband success is due to "non-policy issues" such as population density, rather than policy or technology. Korea and Japan are, to him, the important leaders to watch, but northern Europe, not so much.
Atkinson was contradicted by another expert, Raul Katz of Columbia University's CITI program; Katz declared that Korea's innovations were not leading-edge anymore, but instead the place to look for today's broadband best practices is Denmark. (Katz's presentation is not available on the FCC Web site.)
India, Africa and South America were not mentioned, perhaps because these countries have underdeveloped broadband networks. I was almost ready to think that the implicit aim was to focus on threats to the home team, but if so, it remains puzzling that China was not mentioned. China has more broadband connections than any other nation, and is adding tens of millions of broadband customers a year; indeed, China is walking away from Korea, Japan, northern Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world's acknowledged broadband leaders. Yet the word "China" remained unspoken at yesterday's workshop.
I commend Blair Levin, who's in charge of the FCC's Broadband Plan, for creating the FCC series of broadband workshops. So far there are 23, see here. They make the FCC's information collection process, which, in the past, involved Italian suits and private meetings, open and public. Nevertheless, in the five minutes allotted to each International Lessons panelist, it was hard to get underneath superficiality, claim and spin. A few points of consensus emerged. For example, broadband penetration goes up with income (and other economic indicators), with education and with PC ownership. Also, when you have fatter pipes, each megabit per second per month costs less. Also, cable, DSL and digital wireless are getting better, faster and cheaper. The needle barely moved off absolute duh.
Perhaps the wisest words of the day came from Yochai Benkler. (Benkler's presentation is not available on the FCC Web site.) He said that we need to pay attention to the data, to where it comes from, to how it is collected, to its variability, to its microstructure, before we can begin to grapple with what it means.
I believe there are lessons to be learned from broadband deployments wherever they are, and I've learned a few things along the way, but the International Lessons at yesterday's FCC workshop were far from obvious.