March 12, 2010, 5:40 PM — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission plans to release a national broadband plan next week that will lay out an ambitious set of goals for broadband deployment and adoption.
The official version of the plan will be released at a commission meeting Tuesday, but FCC followers have seen the agency unveil several major thrusts of the plan in a series of speeches and briefings in recent weeks. In a mid-February speech, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski kicked off the announcements by saying it was the agency's goal to bring 100M bps (bits per second) broadband service to 100 million U.S. homes by about 2020.
Many members of the U.S. tech community have called for a national broadband policy for years, and Congress, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in early 2009, required the FCC to develop the plan.
Several tech groups have expressed general support for the announcements so far, but others have questioned how the FCC will accomplish what appears to be a wide-ranging and expensive plan. FCC officials have talked about a cost of $12 billion to $25 billion to implement parts of the plan, with wireless spectrum auction proceeds offsetting the costs, but some critics have suggested the FCC's cost estimates are far too low.
In a time of huge U.S. government budget deficits, there will also be pressure in Congress to use any auction proceeds in other ways.
The broadband plan could meet resistance from incumbent providers as soon as it sees the light of day, said Craig Settles, a community broadband consultant and president of Successful.com.
"I believe the plan is too ambitious for many inside Washington to fully embrace in terms of executing legislation and making funds available," he said. "The average lawmaker, particularly with elections coming up this year, could not care less about broadband. These are the ones most susceptible to lobbyists' attempts to neuter the plan. The telecom and cable industry will mine the lofty rhetoric while trying to kill anything they feel threatens profits."
The major question is whether the FCC can accomplish the "exciting and ambitious" goals in the plan, said Daniel Hays, director of the telecom practice at PRTM, a management consulting firm. "Until we've seen the details, what we've seen so far is sort of like the goal of climbing Mount Everest," he said. "It's a really great goal, but unclear if there's the detail in the plan and the thinking that's going to get us there. Getting it done in 10 years is going to be a Herculean task."
But it was appropriate for the FCC to set ambitious goals, countered Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the trade group the Information Technology Industry Council. In recent years, the U.S. has fallen behind many other industrialized nations in broadband adoption and speed, and the U.S. economy will suffer if it continues to lag, he said.
The FCC plan is "not only achievable, but it's really necessary," Garfield said. Genachowski's goal of 100M bps service to 100 million homes will help the U.S. better compete in the global marketplace, he said.
"There's no question that both the private sector and the public sector are going to have to work hard to achieve these goals, but that's what aspirational goals are," Garfield said. "If we set goals that are eminently achievable, then, yes, we set ourselves up for success, but what are we really trying to do?"
No matter how the plan is received, the FCC doesn't see it as a fixed document, said Blair Levin, executive director of the FCC's Omnibus Broadband Initiative. "The plan is in beta and always will be," he said earlier this week. "This is a call to action."
Here are some of the major pieces of the national broadband plan announced so far:
The FCC wants 100M bps service to be available to 100 million U.S. homes by about 2020.
Some people have questioned whether this goal is ambitious enough, others have questioned how the FCC plans to get there. The U.S. is likely to have about 130 million households by 2020, meaning a good percentage of U.S. homes wouldn't have 100M bps service, Mark Cooper, research director at the Consumer Federation of America, said at a broadband forum in February.
"I know that Chairman Genachowski's vision of America is not a place where 100 million households have 100 megabits of broadband and 30 million households have zero megabits," Cooper said then.
