National Broadband Plan Has Goal to Study Harder

That’s not an Onion headline. But after perusing a few key sections of the officially released National Broadband Plan I learned that the FCC recommendations involve either more study or vague posturings on important policy debates that have been raging since dawn of time: broadening the universal service fund (USF) to include VoIP carriers broadband data services (see weakly worded Recommendation 8.10), wholesale access and pricing (see tepid Recommendation 4.7), openness of mobile devices (no recommendations that I can find), and the overall question of whether we have a competitive broadband market (for what it’s worth, Recommendation 4.2).

I am all for the FCC’s goal that Americans should experience 100 Mbps download rates by 2020. And the report does offer encouraging suggestions: phasing out antiquated rules on carrier compensation, shifting USF funds to encourage broadband, and forming a more efficient spectrum market.

But…

I am currently writing this post on a desktop computer linked to a cable broadband connection that according to the FCC’s speed test achieves a download rate of about 20 Mbps. Meanwhile, in Japan, carriers offer rates of up to 100 Mbps and average broadband speeds supersede those in the US.

In October 2009, the FCC released a study on worldwide broadband policies prepared by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. One of the study’s most unsettling findings is that the US is in the middle of the pack among developed countries. We rank 11^th in our bandwidth speed, and achieve a 13^th spot in our overall broadband ranking (taking into account price, penetration, and speed).

From Next Generation Connectivity, Berkman Center for Internet and Society,2009

According to the report’s authors (ILEC readers probably know what I’m going to say), unbundled or open access has been a driving force behind other countries’ broadband successes:

So what’s the evidence backing up the claim that open access is a better way to go? In their pricing analysis of 59 companies, the Harvard researchers discovered that those firms offering the lowest speeds and the highest prices were concentrated in the US and Canada. Here in North America (and where I’m writing from in New Jersey), the typical arrangement is for one company to owns the cable system, and the other to control the telephone plant.

But the lowest prices and highest service levels are offered by companies that operate in more crowded environments in which major phone and cable operators compete with service providers that were granted shared access to the incumbents’ networks.

You can read case after case in the back of the Berkman report. To take just one example, in France the regulatory framework was reformed in the 1990s to allow for open access (at wholesale rates) to France Telecom’s (FT) state-run network. FT’s underground civil engineering infrastructure was also considered essential and had to be made available to competitors.

The result was that 60% of all broadband access in France now comes through unbundled local loops.

Very little of this evidence and policy suggestions seems to have made its way into the National Broadband Plan. However, if you look hard enough, you can find bits and pieces of these ideas and perhaps some wording that gives the FCC wiggle room.

The truly devoted can track down footnote 75 in Chapter 4 —a reference to Cbeyond’s petition for unbundled access to fiber—and a sentence fragment in Recommendation 4.7, “…determination of what actions are necessary to achieve the FCC’s goals for robust competition in business and consumer markets.”

There may be some hope 😉