Blair Levin on The Spectrum Crunch, and UNE

The FCC’s Blair Levin helped to coordinate the National Broadband Plan, which will be presented to Congress on March 17. Ars Technica’s Matthew Lasar did a Q&A with him, and Levin’s messaging on the economic urgency of more spectrum was pretty consistent with Genachowski’s recent speech to the New America Foundation. Levin put the spot light on the failures of the current system of spectrum allocation, and he’s obviously hoping that broadcasters will agree to the Mobile Future Auction proposal. But he’s a realist, and so he’s expecting more battling between the FCC and the TV broadcasters.

Then he talked about UNE.

Before I get to Levin’s remarks on unbundling, he was pretty open about the differences between regulatory rulings here and the rest of the world:

“You also have a different relationship between the regulators and the industry. In those countries, when a regulator says to do something, what happens is that within a very reasonable, short timeframe, those things are done. What happens in the United States is that, when a regulator says something—I’m not complaining about it; I’m just pointing out reality—it’s challenged in the courts and you have a time lag. So that, I think, is an important consideration.”

What he said!

So the market doesn’t always work, and FCC rulings are ignored and litigated. Where does this leave UNE? Levin remained neutral on whether the ruling by the FCC to eliminate line sharing in 2003 was a good thing. (For the record, it wasn’t.)

Then he added, while there is support for some aspects of unbundling, that’s not “the direction that I see the Commission moving in.”

I’m not sure where this leaves Cbeyond’s petition. Levin agrees that the US broadband market is heavily skewed towards cable. Does this mean that the FCC will make some effort to fight for cable unbundling and forget about legacy copper and telecom plant? I’m being an optimist, not a realist.