Obama administration plays up mobile wireless, ignores 34 million Americans lacking modern landline premise telecom service

As the Obama administration winds down, it is declaring a hollow victory on telecommunications infrastructure, playing up mobile wireless technology while ignoring the plight of some 34 million Americans whose homes and small business that lack service capable of delivering high-quality voice, data, graphics and video, according to figures released by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission earlier this year.

Mobile wireless is also being termed by incumbent telephone companies as a technological transition from non-IP based services that supported legacy telephone, cable TV and early mobile wireless services to Internet protocol-based services. Problem is many of those aforementioned 34 million Americans are being left out of the transition since landline infrastructure isn't being modernized and built out to serve them. And as many observers have pointed out including here, mobile wireless service alone cannot meet the needs of homes and small businesses due to technological constraints and high cost.

The bankruptcy of Obama administration's telecom policy

Continuing the Broadband Dialogue with States: This week, broadband leaders from across the country convened at the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition’s annual conference to discuss key broadband policy issues important to communities and community anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and libraries. NTIA had the opportunity to participate in several sessions at the conference to discuss our continued efforts to implement Obama Administration initiatives aimed at promoting broadband access, adoption and digital inclusion. We also had the chance to meet with about two dozen officials from 15 states who work on broadband initiatives. The meeting was part of our efforts to keep an ongoing dialogue with state broadband leaders to sustain their peer network as a valuable vehicle for knowledge sharing. Many of these state officials helped run programs that received funding through NTIA’s State Broadband Initiative (SBI). The SBI grants provided funding to each state, territory and the District of Columbia to collect the broadband availability data that helped power the National Broadband Map. In addition, SBI grantees used some of the funding to identify and address obstacles to broadband deployment and adoption in their states or territories.
While the SBI grant program is finished, 41 of the 56 states and territories that received SBI funding are continuing their state broadband programs in some fashion using their own funds. Several states continue collecting data for their own broadband maps, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Virginia and Utah.

More meetings, more talk and more busy work on useless "broadband maps" that taken as a whole, are not meaningfully deploying fiber to modernize America's rapidly aging, obsolete and spotty telecommunications infrastructure. This is an urgent national problem that grows increasingly so by the month and year. It's one that can't be addressed by shifting it to the states. Strong federal leadership and support are needed.

This National Telecommunications and Information Administration update illustrates the bankruptcy of the Obama administration's telecom policy. It's unfortunate given nearly eight years ago, the Obama administration came into office with the promise of rapid, aggressive action to move the nation forward. Instead, it settled for half hearted efforts that left undisturbed a major obstacle to progress -- incumbent legacy telephone and cable companies.

Obama administration, FCC use incumbent "broadband adoption" talking point designed to shift attention from nation's telecom infrastructure deficiencies

Obama Seeks Broadband for 20 Million More Low-Income Subscribers - The New York Times: The White House also released a report outlining the economic effects of broadband adoption, focused on how families without broadband at home are at a disadvantage in finding jobs.

Once again, the Obama administration and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission conflate access to advanced telecommunications service with its use. They are two different things. The unfortunate use of the term "broadband adoption" parrots a favorite talking point of the legacy telephone and cable companies to take the focus off the nation's telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies that leave some 34 million Americans without access to landline premise service according to the FCC's most recent estimate released in January. After all, the incumbent argument goes, why should we build Internet telecom infrastructure when people aren't using computers at home and therefore not adopting "broadband?"

The term "broadband" dates back to the late 1990s when people were beginning to migrate from narrowband, dial up Internet service to faster "broadband" connections. The context there was personal computer connections to the Internet. Which is also outdated given that today, Internet connections also provide voice and video services that don't require a personal computer.

As long as policymakers insist upon living in 1999, it will be difficult for America to advance into the 21st century.

Obama administration's ConnectHome initiative offers only partial solution to homework gap

Rather than a bold, disruptive initiative to speed the construction of fiber to the premise (FTTP) Internet infrastructure to serve all Americans and replace aging metallic infrastructure designed for legacy analog telephone and cable TV service that leaves many U.S. homes without Internet service, the Obama administration today announced a weak, narrowly focused initiative that targets low income households. From a policy perspective, that runs counter to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's adoption this year of new regulations classifying Internet as a common carrier telecommunications service that must be universally available to all homes as voice telephone service has been for decades.

The administration's ConnectHome initiative also adopts classic incumbent telephone and cable industry talking points aimed at:

• Shifting the focus away from the nation's infrastructure deficits by playing up dollars invested in infrastructure and particularly mobile wireless infrastructure that can't provide sufficient bandwidth to serve most homes.
  
• Emphasizing Internet adoption and developing "digital literacy" as if it were still the 1990s when the Internet was just emerging and households were using it only for web and email access versus today when the Internet delivers voice and video services as well.

The United States faces a serious telecommunications infrastructure deficit that is reaching crisis proportions as those living in areas without service grow increasingly economically disadvantaged and their properties become less marketable. Data released by the U.S Federal Communications Commission in early 2015 indicate approximately 55 million Americans (17 percent) live in areas unserved for basic Internet service as defined by the FCC, with the gap narrowing by only three percentage points in the last year.

The White House fact sheet on ConnectHome issued today contains a narrowly proscribed analysis of the "homework gap" that occurs when school pupils can't access learning materials at home because their homes lack Internet service:

While many middle-class U.S. students go home to Internet access, allowing them to do research, write papers, and communicate digitally with their teachers and other students, too many lower-income children go unplugged every afternoon when school ends. This “homework gap” runs the risk of widening the achievement gap, denying hardworking students the benefit of a technology-enriched education. 

The homework gap isn't confined solely to low income households. It affects any home located in an area of the nation lacking premise Internet service regardless of socio-economic status. The administration need only ask educators like Jeremy Meyers, superintendent of the El Dorado County (California) Office of Education. Meyers wrote in his community newspaper about the emerging educational method known as "blended learning" in which pupils do much of their learning and class projects outside of the classroom via the Internet. Back in the classroom, teachers review their projects, answer questions and lead discussions.

As Meyers notes, blended learning requires good Internet connectivity both at schools and at students' homes. However, too many homes in Meyers' district lack even basic Internet service. "El Dorado County faces a special challenge that is assuming greater urgency each year: How to bring all our households into broadband Internet access in a cost-effective manner," Meyers wrote. "Having large Internet 'dead zones' is not acceptable in today’s world of connectivity. It limits us academically and hurts us economically."

US federal government will have to provide substantial funding for Internet infrastructure construction

Obama: This federal council will jumpstart broadband - CNET: Obama first introduced this idea in January, when he traveled to Cedar Falls, Iowa to announce his plan to promote "Broadband that Works," a public-private effort to help more Americans get access to speedier broadband.

As part of this new push, he urged the FCC to strike down state laws to ensure communities could build or expand their own 1 gigabit-per-second networks, which offer downloads 100 times faster than conventional connections.

The new council will include 25 federal agencies and departments that will work with private industry to understand how the federal government can help communities increase broadband investment and reduce barriers to deployment. The council will be co-chaired by the U.S. Commerce and Agriculture departments. The council will report back to Obama, within 150 days, with the steps each agency will take to advance these goals, including specific regulatory actions or budget proposals.

The biggest barrier to Internet infrastructure investment is private market failure on the sell side. That's been patently obvious for more than a decade; it doesn't take more than two dozen federal agencies and departments to ascertain that. The existing dominant U.S. commercial model for providing telecommunications services is based on selling "subscriptions" to and "owning" the customer, consistent with the natural monopoly market that favors large vertically integrated legacy telephone and cable TV providers.

Its primary weakness is it is wholly dependent on ARPU and ROI which don't easily pencil out in much of the nation and aren't likely to given that labor costs that make up about 70 percent of network deployment and maintenance expense are not declining and don't benefit from economies of scale. This produces an all or nothing scenario and lots of winners and losers -- with millions of premises stuck in the latter category for nearly two decades.

If the United States is to have modern telecommunications infrastructure in the 21st century that serves all Americans wherever they live or operate their businesses, the federal government must commit big as it did for electrification, water, telephone and highways in the 20th century. The states don't have the funding to do the job on their own such as Maine, for example, where the state has appropriated only $1 million to fund Internet infrastructure projects that won't go very far when billions are needed. In New York, $500 million in matching public funds isn't attracting much interest as legacy incumbent providers stand warily on the sidelines.

What will be truly interesting is what regulatory actions and budget proposals will be recommended by the newly created federal council. On the regulatory front, the Federal Communications Commission has already acted by deeming the Internet as a common carrier telecommunications service. That leaves it up to fiscal strategies, which should include substantial technical assistance and infrastructure funding for the states along the lines of existing block grant and federal highway programs. Or in recognition that the nation is a generation behind on construction progress, the federal government could built it directly on a crash program basis with early completion bonuses for contractors. Then operate the network on an open access basis, contracting for operations and maintenance and leasing out access to providers under long term contracts.

Obama administration continues to ignore US need for ubiquitous FTTP

The Obama administration continues to ignore the need for ubiquitous fiber to the premise infrastructure serving all American homes and small businesses.

The administration instead is pursuing a PR campaign to shift attention to mobile wireless service that can't accommodate growing premise bandwidth demand as well as pointless activities such as "broadband mapping" and measuring "broadband speeds" that will do nothing to construct the FTTP infrastructure the nation should have been putting in place a generation ago.

Administration’s “broadband” push window dressing

Always something happening and nothing going on
There's always something cooking and nothing in the pot
-- John Lennon, Nobody Told Me

The Obama administration’s PR initiative this week on U.S. telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies is largely window dressing and will likely mean the wired network that Americans have today for their home and small business Internet connection is likely the same one they’ll have for the foreseeable. This prediction was made in 2012 by former U.S Federal Communications Commission official Blair Levin and continues to hold true in 2015:

"For the first time since American ingenuity birthed the commercial Internet, we do not have a single national wireline provider with plans (real plans, not “fiber to the press release”) to deploy a better network. For most Americans, five years from now, the best network available to them will be the same network they have today."

The reason is the same as in 2012: insufficient available capital. Building Internet infrastructure to serve homes and businesses is a high cost endeavor. Those high costs have produced market failure on the supply side as the administration acknowledges, noting in this fact sheet that three of four Americans lack networks providing a level of service increasingly required for many online services. “Rarely is the problem a lack of demand — too often, it is the capital costs of building out broadband infrastructure…”

The administration is correct that local governments will have to play a major role in meeting the Internet infrastructure needs of their residents, infrastructure many argue is as critical in the 21^st century as roads and highways were in the 20^th. But it has no meaningful plan to help these localities finance infrastructure construction beyond highly limited and restricted funding available through existing grant and loan programs directed to rural areas of the nation that are only a drop in the bucket relative to the many billions of dollars needed.

In fairness to the administration, even it if did have a plan, it would face difficult odds getting Congress to appropriate the necessary funding. That has left the administration with little to offer in the way of tangible economic assistance. The administration is relaunching its BroadbandUSA website, where among other things it will offer “funding leads” for financing infrastructure construction. Given the lack of needed dollars, the administration has also been reduced to talking points that unfortunately won’t do anything to build last mile fiber to the premise infrastructure including:

• Increasing “competition.” (Sounds great, but ignores the fact that telecommunications infrastructure is a natural monopoly, not a competitive consumer market like groceries, vehicles and air travel. It also undermines Obama's position that Internet should be regulated under Title II telecommunications common carrier rules that are predicated on a monopoly market.)
• Enforcing “net neutrality” rules on Internet service providers. (A wonky term that doesn’t mean anything to consumers with subpar or no wired Internet service options).

Obama administration seeks public option for Internet infrastructure - The Washington Post

Obama wants to help make your Internet faster and cheaper. This is his plan. - The Washington Post: Frustrated over the number of Internet providers that are available to you? If so, you're like many who are limited to just a handful of broadband companies. But now President Obama wants to change that, arguing that choice and competition are lacking in the U.S. broadband market. On Wednesday, Obama will unveil a series of measures aimed at making high-speed Web connections cheaper and more widely available to millions of Americans. The announcement will focus chiefly on efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T — a public option for Internet access, you could say.

The public option is certainly needed given Internet telecommunications infrastructure is to the 21st century what roads and highways were to the 20th. Relying totally on commercial, investor-owned providers won't build that needed infrastructure. There simply isn't enough investment capital to get it done. And to get the choice and competition for Internet services the administration seeks, that infrastructure must be open access fiber to the premise, selling access on a wholesale basis to service providers who compete to offer services to businesses and consumers.

Like building the highways of the 20th century, that infrastructure won't come cheap. For the public option to become a reality rather than aspirational rhetoric, it will have to be backed with billions of dollars in funding to help regions of the United States build fiber to the premise Internet infrastructure on a par with telephone lines in the last century that served all Americans no matter where they made their homes or operated a business.

Incumbent telcos warn feds: Let us have our way, or the consumer gets it

New Study Projects Investment Declines under Title II | USTelecom

Incumbent telephone companies have warned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (and indirectly, the Obama administration) that they will tie up in the courts for years any move to regulate Internet services as a Title II common carrier telecommunications service available to all customer premises without discrimination.

Now they are citing a study to back up their threat that they will also significantly pare back construction of new infrastructure. In other words, if you don't let us pick and choose which neighborhoods we want to serve, we'll leave the 19 million premises the FCC estimates are not served by landline Internet service twisting in the wind. Ditto those on increasingly obsolete, legacy DSL service provided over aging copper cables.

That's monopolist speak for if you don't leave us alone, the consumer gets it.

Creating a Two-Speed Internet - NYTimes.com

Creating a Two-Speed Internet - NYTimes.com: Mr. Wheeler is seeking public comment on this option, but he is not in favor of it. Even though the appeals court has said the F.C.C. has authority to reclassify broadband, the agency has not done so because phone and cable companies, along with their mostly Republican supporters in Congress, strongly oppose it.

The incumbent telephone and cable companies want to do this because they want to keep alive the fantasy that the Internet is not a telecommunications service but rather a "broadband" or "information" service. It's the same old "fight the future" strategy they've employed for at least a decade.

In 2007, President Obama said one of the best things about the Internet “is that there is this incredible equality there” and charging “different rates to different websites” would destroy that principle. The proposal from Mr. Wheeler, an Obama appointee, would do just that.

Quite a damning indictment of the Obama administration's telecommunications policy -- or absence thereof.

Obama administration should focus on community-run open access fiber, not 4G wireless

The Obama administration's recent announcement of its National Wireless Initiative to subsidize the build out of 4th generation (4G) wireless Internet to make it available to least 98 percent of Americans appears based on the assumption that cutting edge wireless telecommunications technology can play a central role in the nation's telecom infrastructure.

I'm not convinced. 4G wireless is only just emerging and remains unproven in terms of whether it can deliver sufficient bandwidth at the same time bandwidth demand is increasing exponentially. It's primarily designed for mobile use and portable devices such as smart phones and IPads that are gobbling bandwidth at such a prodigious rate that providers have a difficult time meeting the demand. That's why they ration bandwidth and penalize wireless customers who use more than 5 GB per month. The rationing is due to a more basic telecom infrastructure problem: the lack of adequate wire line infrastructure to "backhaul" or feed the distribution system that supports that huge and growing universe of wireless devices.

The administration's wireless initiative seems to suggest that people can "cut the cord" for Internet access just as they have done for wire line voice service, which requires far less bandwidth. 4G wireless, the administration apparently believes, can provide access to medical tests, online courses and applications that have not yet been invented.

That remains to be seen. What is certain now is wire line fiber optic connections to American households and businesses can deliver more than enough bandwidth for today's needs without the need for rationing plus plenty of additional capacity for those yet to be invented applications. The administration's telecom infrastructure efforts should focus on bringing it to the 24 million Americans that Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski said remain disconnected from the Internet. "The infrastructure simply isn’t there," Genachowski explained.

The reason: It's simply not sufficiently profitable for investor owned providers to build it. Alternative, lower cost methods are urgently needed. The best and most rapid way to bring about these alternatives is to focus at the local level and provide local governments and consumer telecom cooperatives technical assistance grants and low cost loans to build open access fiber networks to serve their communities.

The administration's health care reform legislation allocates $5 billion in technical assistance grants to for new health insurance cooperatives to pool risk and purchase health coverage for their members. The administration should provide a similar amount of technical assistance funding for local governments and telecom cooperatives to help them plan and design open access fiber optic telecom networks.

Internet access is the new dial tone, but millions of Americans are disconnected

Three years ago, then-U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein called on the nation to make broadband "the dial-tone of the 21st Century."

Adelstein's characterization is correct. Today, the Internet is the telecommunications network. Those who don't have access to it are disconnected and isolated.

The Huffington Post has posted a summary of Akamai Technologies' State of the Internet" report for the first quarter of 2010 showing which states are the most offline. (Hat tip to Jason Wilson) It wouldn't surprise me if these states find it toughest to help boost the nation out of a deep economic contraction, being sidelined in an increasingly Internet-based economy.

The governors of these (and other) states should ask the Obama administration to create a Work Projects Administration-like entity to embark on a crash program to construct locally owned and operated fiber networks to serve all Americans where they live and work. Achieving this goal is a stated administration policy. Moreover, given the administration's projected multiplier effect of a project like this in terms of job creation and economic activity, it could well end up being revenue neutral when increased tax revenues are factored in.

Public policy collides with business interests of telco/cable duopoly

According to Oakland, Calif.-based consultant Craig Settles, the Obama administration's stated policy goal of broadband access for all Americans is colliding with the narrower economic interest of the legacy telephone and cable companies. That conflict is playing out within the context of the administration's economic stimulus legislation that was signed into law almost one year ago.

Settles points to an estimated 9,000 challenges and protests the incumbents brought against proposed projects seeking more than $4 billion in infrastructure subsidies set aside in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The challenges are being raised under a broadband black hole preservation clause in rules two federal agencies wrote to govern allocation of the subsidies that allows incumbents to protest proposed projects on the grounds they already provide advanced telecommunications services in the area proposed to be served.

The telcos and cable companies want to preserve what they regard as their exclusive franchises for a given "service territory" even though their business models don't allow them to construct the infrastructure necessary to bring advanced telecommunications services to all homes and businesses that need (and try to order) them.

This is the crux of the clash between the business interests of the telco/cable duopoly and public policy that will clearly have to be expeditiously resolved by the Obama administration and Congress if the subsidies are to function as intended. As Settles put it in an article appearing earlier this week in USA Today: "We're at a point where it's the general public's interest vs. the entrenched incumbents."

Broadband stimulus funds insufficient -- but agreement ends there

It seems everyone agrees that the $7.2 billion in subsidies set aside in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for broadband infrastructure construction aren't anywhere close to what's needed to overhaul the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to allow it to support ubiquitous next generation, Internet-Protocol-based telecommunications.

Blair Levin, the Federal Communications Commission's broadband czar, described the stimulus subsidies just days before President Barack Obama took office in January as a down payment, representing only a portion of the new administration's planned efforts.

This week, the Boston-based Yankee Group concurred, issuing a summary of a study concluding the $7.2 billion figure is woefully inadequate, representing less than a third of the needed investment.
The Yankee Group study also reinforces the FCC's own findings. In a Sept. 29 news release, the FCC declared $7.2 billion in grants and loan subsidies contained in the economic stimulus package "are insufficient to achieve national purposes." The FCC said $20 billion would be the price of a minimum "basic" broadband that would be quickly outmoded.

The Yankee Group put the minimum figure close to the FCC's: $24 billion. Either of these figures would represent a wasteful investment in technology that would soon be obsolete. The FCC's $20 billion would achieve connectivity ranging between 768 Kbs -- already outmoded -- and 3 Mbs, which is on the verge of obsolescence given the growing amount of high bandwidth video content. To bring the U.S. where it needs to be for the future -- fiber to the premises providing throughput of 100 Mbs or better -- the FCC puts the number at $350 billion.

Behind the consensus that more money is needed beyond the $7.2 in the stimulus package is disagreement over where it will come from and under what terms. Splits exist even within the Obama administration. Earlier this month Levin was quoted in Multichannel News telling an FCC meeting that private investment -- and not by implication federal subsidies -- would foot the bill. But just four months earlier, Jim Kohlenberger, chief of staff for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, said private market failure has hamstrung telecom infrastructure investment.

The private sector -- largely represented by the legacy telco/cable duopoly and their astroturf groups -- is firing warning shots across the bow of the FCC as it readies a major regulatory policy recommendation due to Congress in February. They are sending the message that unless they can invest in infrastructure on their own terms and retain control over it, further investment will be jeopardized. That will lead to a reverse stimulus, eliminating rather than creating jobs, the Internet Innovation Alliance warned Oct. 20.

FCC's Levin: Private sector must foot bill for broadband build out

A Multichannel News item today quotes Blair Levin, the Federal Communications Commission's broadband czar, as telling an FCC meeting last week on the broadband deployment plan mandated by Congress that it will largely fall to the private sector to fund the build out America's broadband infrastructure.

Whatever the cost, FCC broadband consultant Blair Levin conceded that private industry will foot most of the bill.

“We have to recognize that most of this [broadband] ecosystem is funded by the private sector, and we expect that to continue,” said Levin. "But government has a role to move whichever levers are necessary to improve the health of that ecosystem, he said.

I respectfully submit Levin's analysis is too limited in scope. The ecosystem will also require substantial public sector involvement and that of non governmental organizations (NGOs) like nonprofit telecom consumer cooperatives that bridged the gap at the beginning of the 20th century when investor owned telephone companies shunned their communities because they couldn't afford to both serve them and earn a return for their investors.

Reconstructing America's outdated single purpose, copper-based analog telecom infrastucture and replacing it with the open access, next generation fiber to the premises Internet Protocol-based system it needs now and in the future is an enormously costly endeavor that cannot be borne solely by investor-owned telcos and cable companies.

In developing its forthcoming national broadband plan, the FCC has estimated it would cost $350 billion to build this kind of infrastructure. So costly in fact that just days after the FCC issued that estimate, the James L. Knight Foundation issued a report equating the task of building adequate infrastructure ensuring all Americans have access to the modern digital telecommunications necessary for a 21st century democracy to the Eisenhower administration's 1950s project to build the interstate highway system.

Had the private sector been relied upon to foot the cost of the massive highway project, Route 66 might have been in use as the nation's main cross county highway until only recently instead of serving as a reminiscent film setting of post WWII America.

Levin's suggestion the private sector primarily bear the cost of updating the nation's telecom infrastructure is also at odds with remarks by another Obama administration official at the Broadband Stimulus National Town Hall held in Washington in early June. Market failure has constrained the ability of America's privately owned telecom infrastructure to deliver universally accessible broadband-based services, requiring government to fill the gap, Jim Kohlenberger, chief of staff for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology told gathering, according to a BroadbandCensus.com report.

As with proposed health care coops, U.S. should seed telecom coops

One of the most debated aspects of the current health care reform effort pending in Congress is how and to what extent any overhaul should foster market competition among managed care plans and insurers. Due to the high costs of paying for medical care for large numbers of people and the substantial capital barriers to entry, the market is oligopolistic with a relatively small number of players operating in each state.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus's (D-Mont.) solution unveiled today in his markup of America’s Health Future Act: purchasing pools for small businesses and consumer cooperatives. The Baucus bill appropriates $6 billion in seed money to help the coops cover start-up costs and to meet solvency requirements.

What does this have to do with advanced telecommunications infrastructure? Like health insurance, the market over the so-called "last mile" also tends to be uncompetitive due to the high capital costs of entry. In fact, it's even less competitive than health insurance from consumers' perspective as telecom infrastructure is a natural monopoly or at best, a duopoly. Here too, coops can provide a degree of competition and choice that's lacking.

Not only that, they can help the Obama administration fulfill its stated policy goal of extending broadband access to all Americans by building out advanced telecommunications infrastructure. As Sen. Baucus proposes, Congress and the administration should similarly seed fund telecom cooperatives that also face high start up costs and capital requirements.

FCC wants comment on defining broadband

The Federal Communications Commission has issued a public notice requesting comment on how it should define broadband, a question that arose not long before the Obama administration assumed office at the start of the year. The notice contains a caveat on focusing on throughput speed:

Much of the discussion of any proposal to define “broadband” tends to center on download and upload throughput. Download and upload throughput are important, but neither is precise or diverse enough to describe broadband satisfactorily.

Indeed. The issue isn't broadband itself, but the poor state of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure that has tended to keep the focus on speed and latency, largely because it's so lousy in much of the nation that its ability to deliver what could even be charitably described as broadband is sketchy and often nonexistent.

Broadband should be instead be defined as fiber infrastructure to the premises. As the FCC notice suggests, any definition based what the pipes can carry rather than the pipes themselves will devolve the discussion into a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" debate and result in the the lowest possible standard chosen in order to dispose of the question in the most politically expedient manner.

Fiber is proven technology and remains the most obsolescence proof advanced telecommunications infrastructure going to best accommodate the growing volume of bandwidth hungry applications and multiple services.