U.S. fails to define clear policy goal on telecom

Instead of articulating a clear policy to encourage construction of next generation Internet protocol-based telecommunications infrastructure, the U.S. government is trying to figure out how to "regulate broadband."

It's a classic case of failure to clearly and properly define the mission. Over the long run, the consequences will be severe. The nation is already at least a dozen years behind where it should be in making the transition to next generation telecom infrastructure. Unless the course is changed, the U.S. will continue suffer from mission drift and fall further behind other developed nations on upgrading its telecom infrastructure from one designed primarily for standard voice telephone service to a high speed data network.

Meanwhile, it fiddles with arcane network management rules that mean nothing to the occupants of some seven million U.S. homes located outside cable company footprints or who are unable to subscribe to legacy telco DSL due to distance limitations -- or whose connections are so poor they limit what they can do with them. And wastes precious resources on creating useless maps of broadband black holes that only advertise to the world the pathetic state of American telecommunications infrastructure.