Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association of Public Broadband, made a profound observation on U.S. telecommunications policy in a podcast interview this week with Mike Masnick of TechDirt at (around 47:50)
“The facilities-based competition when you have cable competing against telecom competing against wireless, maybe wasn’t the best idea."
Sohn is essentially -- and astutely-- questioning a fundamental policy premise of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and once held by her former boss, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler: that facilities-based competition would unleash market forces that would benefit all Americans by bringing them affordable Internet access.
This is also referred to as "technological neutrality" in the context of subsidizing advanced telecommunications infrastructure. The assumption baked into law -- along with opening up the legacy metallic copper telephone delivery plant to Internet Service Providers -- is market competition would benefit all Americans regardless of their location by bringing them access to the then-emerging form of digital telecommunications.
It was incorrect largely because fiber optic delivery technology existed in the 1990s that was technologically capable of modernizing the legacy copper and cable coax connections to homes, businesses and institutions. No technology has emerged since that's superior to fiber when it comes to delivering high quality, reliable digital, voice and video services.
Another fundamental flaw in this policy was seeing connectivity as a market commodity of "broadband bandwidth" instead of a natural monopoly that utilities are and where market forces don't operate to benefit buyers and instead strongly favor sellers. A single fiber connection would suffice; fiber to the premises (FTTP) should have been designated as the national telecom delivery infrastructure standard. There is no need for more than one fiber connection or other type of technologies for premise service.
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