Incoming federal government could place greater emphasis on “broadband” bandwidth over fiber, cut subsidies

For the past three decades, U.S. advanced telecommunications policy has been bandwidth focused: defining and delivering “broadband” speed – and not modernizing the nation’s legacy metallic telephone and cable TV delivery infrastructure to fiber. That policy focus is likely to gain greater emphasis with a new federal government taking office in 2025.

Blair Levin, a widely quoted analyst and former U.S. Federal Communications Commission official, told Fierce Network that “the biggest question is whether the new administration will take the view that satellite broadband is equal or better than terrestrial alternatives.”

More than likely it will given president-elect Donald Trump’s indicated approval for LEO satellite internet service over subsidizing fiber to the premises (FTTP) landline infrastructure preferred by the Biden administration’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan less than two weeks before his election, Trump impliedly suggested Congress could end subsidies for FTTP, pointing to Elon Musk’s Starlink LEO satellite Internet service. “We're spending a trillion dollars to get cables all over the country, right up to upstate areas where you have like two farms,” Trump told Rogan. “And they're spending millions of dollars [via BEAD]…Elon can do it for nothing.”

Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) President Gary Bolton holds out hope modernizing twisted pair copper and coax cable delivery infrastructure to fiber will nevertheless remain on the table in the incoming government. "We’re optimistic the new Congress and administration will provide opportunities to build out more robust rural fiber connectivity," Bolton said in a statement to Fierce Network.

Google Fiber's impact overrated

Incompas 2020 Policy Summit: Unraveling Broadband Challenges And Opportunities for Competitors, Communities: Blair Levin, policy analyst at New Street Research and nonresident fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, said during the summit that these elements largely were influenced by the National Broadband Plan team’s conversations with the private sector. “While everyone thinks of Google Fiber as a business, there’s no question that it accelerated the next-generation networks from AT&T and CenturyLink as well as the cable industry,” Levin said.

Um, no. Google Fiber folded up its tent and began decamping in 2016 after a brief six-year-long presence in the fiber to the prem (FTTP) business. It provided no sustained and meaningful pressure on the big telcos and cablecos and their infrastructure plans due to its abandonment of the race, drawing mockery from AT&T. Had Google Fiber provided an impetus to AT&T, it would have replaced the legacy copper in its service territory with fiber over the past decade rather than respond with ridicule.

What Google Fiber proved was the poor progress the U.S. has made modernizing its legacy copper telecom infrastructure to FTTP as evidenced by the more than 1,100 communities that asked it to deploy in 2010.

Blair Levin misses key distinction on advanced telecom infrastructure

A broadband agenda for the (eventual) infrastructure bill: Governors have internal agencies and incentives for spending federal discretionary funding on traditional infrastructure sectors like water, sewer, and roads, a point missed in the White House’s argument that money would flow to rural broadband. If we want universal connectivity, the reality is that we need dedicated funds.

Blair Levin's right. But he misses a crucial distinction. Current U.S. policy regards advanced telecommunications infrastructure not as infrastructure per se but rather as a commercial enterprise of selling "broadband" bandwidth to individual customer premises. Expanding it has thus involved tossing token sums (millions for infrastructure that costs billions) to mostly incumbent legacy telephone companies with no real strings attached and no universal service mandate -- unlike subsidies for analog voice telephone service over copper in high cost areas.

And since the focus has been on bandwidth, the debate over subsidization has bogged down over what constitutes adequate bandwidth -- a debate in which Levin has found himself mired in the rest of his piece. It's absurd since bandwidth isn't static and demand continues to grow rapidly with various connected devices and high definition video. Tragically, as the years long controversy over bandwidth adequacy continues, the United States continues to fall further behind where it should be: having fiber connections to every address and not just a select few. That is a real, solid definition of universal service.

Blair Levin's "broadband competition" fantasy

Achieving Bandwidth Abundance: The Three Policy Levers for Intensifying Broadband Competition | ISOC-DC: The trial and many errors of my own work have led me to believe in the following bottom line: that the highest priority for government broadband competition policy ought to be to lower input costs for adjacent market competition and network upgrades. Today I will make the case for that bottom line and illustrate where I think the greatest opportunity is; to create a virtuous cycle of upgraded mobile stimulating low-end broadband to upgrade, which in turn causes an upgrade of high-end broadband which, by using its assets to enter mobile, accelerates the need for mobile to accelerate its upgrade further.

Blair Levin, a Brookings Institution fellow who drafted the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan issued in 2010, somehow believes boosting mobile wireless "competition" to offer greater bandwidth will generate synergistic "competition" among landline premise Internet service providers and result in "bandwidth abundance." 

It's utter hogwash for the simple fact that telecommunications infrastructure -- regardless of whether it supports mobile or premise service -- is not a competitive market. Never has been and never will be due to high cost barriers to entry and uncertain return on investment as a mathematical expression in Levin's presentation illustrates. 

Levin's fantasy scenario would have us believe that if Verizon deploys next generation 5G mobile service, that would somehow spur Comcast or AT&T, for example, to upgrade and build out fiber to the premise (FTTP) infrastructure in areas where Verizon has rolled out 5G mobile. It's wishful economic sophistry. Levin offers no explanation as to how or why that would occur.

Hyper local view of Internet telecom infrastructure misguided, reinforces network access disparities

City Broadband Plans: One Vision, Four Markets, Four Issues | Benton Foundation: My message today is simple: every city needs its own broadband plan.

At one time, I would have agreed with this statement by Blair Levin, who wrote the 2010 U.S. "National Broadband Plan" while serving on the staff of the Federal Communications Commission. I even went as far as paraphrasing the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill by declaring "all broadband is local" on this blog.

I no longer hold that view. It's not just about "broadband" in a given municipality or as is more often the case, a particular neighborhood. Instead, the truly important issue is ubiquitous Internet telecommunications infrastructure in keeping with the FCC's recent reclassification of Internet service as a common carrier utility. And that infrastructure is fundamentally interstate -- much like the federally funded interstate highway system -- and global. In that regard, it's not directly comparable to the municipal and cooperative electric power systems created in the early 20th century that generated and distributed power consumed locally. The Internet is a telecommunications network that reaches far beyond the borders of a given city or town and whose true value is recognized by Metcalfe's Law, which holds a network increases in utility as more users are added to it. In short, it's all about the network and not "broadband" or discrete "gigabit cities."

The hyper-local focus on this essential infrastructure for the 21st century is well meaning and understandable in the absence of strong federal leadership and support. But it's also misguided and dangerous because it serves to reinforce incremental thinking and Internet infrastructure disparities that have plagued the nation for a generation. It's also unrealistic to expect local governments to shoulder the financial burden as they continue to deal with the adverse impacts of the 2008 economic downturn and are strapped to fix crumbling roads, schools, sewer and water infrastructure and fund enormous public pension obligations.

If it is to realize the full value of the Internet, the United States should instead adopt a bold, wholistic and robustly funded national Internet infrastructure initiative to bring fiber infrastructure to all homes, businesses and institutions.

Fundamental flaw: Linear thinking prevails in an exponentially changing world of Internet-based telecom

The Law of Accelerating Returns | POTs and PANs: The FCC recently set the new definition of broadband at 25 Mbps. When I look around at the demand in the world today at how households use broadband services, this feels about right. But at the same time, the FCC has agreed to pour billions of dollars through the Connect America Fund to assist the largest telcos in upgrading their rural DSL to 15 Mbps. Not only is that speed not even as fast as today’s definition of broadband, but the telcos have up to seven years to deploy the upgraded technology, during which time the broadband needs of the customers this is intended for will have increased to four times higher than today’s needs. And likely, once the subsidy stops the telcos will say that they are finished upgrading and this will probably be the last broadband upgrade in those areas for another twenty years, at which point the average household’s broadband needs will be 32 times higher than today.

I laud Google and a few others for pushing the idea of gigabit networks. This concept says that we should leap over the exponential curve and build a network today that is already future-proofed. I see networks all over the country that have the capacity to provide much faster speeds than are being sold to customers. I still see cable company networks with tons of customers still sitting at 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps as the basic download speed and fiber networks with customers being sold 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps products. And I have to ask: why?

Some excerpts from an excellent blog post from Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting that explains to a great extent why the United States suffers from inadequate telecom infrastructure: employing an ill suited linear planning and business model for today's Internet-based telecommunications space that is expanding exponentially. I too have asked why -- why providers and regulators view Internet-based telecom like a consumptive utility such as electric power, water or natural gas and base their business models on packaging and selling bandwidth rather than telecommunications services? For example, see this provider's "dedicated optical fiber" service that slices and dices bandwidth into seven (yes, seven) bandwidth tiers at exorbitant prices on a fiber circuit that can easily deliver 1 Gigabit of bandwidth.

The consequence of the linear, incremental thinking that dominates in telecom manifests in what I have termed Levin's Law of Internet Infrastructure Inertia.*

*Blair Levin, a former U.S Federal Communications Commission official and lead author of the FCC’s 2010 National Broadband Plan observed in 2012 that the major landline ISPs had no plans to improve and build out their infrastructures. “For most Americans, five years from now, the best network available to them will be the same network they have today," Levin stated.

Levin's Law of Internet Infrastructure Inertia may prevail over FCC universal service mandate

This week’s report and order by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that imposes a universal service requirement on Internet infrastructure providers may do little to over the next decade to ensure all premises have access to landline Internet connections.

As they did soon after the Communications Act was amended in 1996 requiring telephone companies to share their network infrastructures with competitive providers, the large telephone companies -- joined by cable companies – could challenge the rule in the courts and drag their feet implementing it.

They might also argue that they cannot afford to provide universal service within their service territories because there are insufficient subsidies given this week’s draft order defers enforcement of Section 254(d) of the Communications Act requiring telecommunications carriers to fund universal service.

With a generation of progress toward connecting all American premises with fiber already squandered, the associated delays could buy the big incumbent telephone and cable companies another 10 years or more of business as usual, allowing them to continue to cherry pick communities, neighborhoods and roads and streets they prefer to serve and redline those they reject.

That would leave Levin's Law of Internet Infrastructure Inertia* intact and the resulting entrenched disparate access to landline Internet service that leaves about one in five U.S. homes and small businesses unable to order service.

*Blair Levin, a former U.S Federal Communications Commission official and lead author of the FCC’s 2010 National Broadband Plan observed in 2012 that the major landline ISPs had no plans to improve and build out their infrastructures. “For most Americans, five years from now, the best network available to them will be the same network they have today," Levin stated.

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).

FCC pronouncements on Internet adequacy won't address U.S. telecom infrastructure deficit

Only 25Mbps and up will qualify as broadband under new FCC definition | Ars Technica: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler today is proposing to raise the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

As part of the Annual Broadband Progress Report mandated by Congress, the Federal Communications Commission has to determine whether broadband “is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” The FCC’s latest report, circulated by Wheeler in draft form to fellow commissioners, “finds that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, especially in rural areas, on Tribal lands, and in US Territories,” according to a fact sheet the FCC provided to Ars.

Unless the U.S. Federal Communications Commission under Wheeler's chairmanship decides this year to reclassify Internet service as a common carrier utility that like telephone service must be offered to all premises that request it, the FCC will find itself issuing similar findings next year and every year thereafter.

Blair Levin, who served as chief of staff to one of Wheeler's FCC predecessors, Reed Hundt, predicted in 2012 that for the foreseeable, the best wireline network available to most Americans will be the same one they had then. Nearly three years later, that will remain the case regardless of any FCC pronouncements of what constitutes adequate Internet service and whether Internet infrastructure is being deployed in a timely manner -- lacking meaningful action.

The major causes of U.S. premise Internet service policy quagmire

U.S. telecommunications policy for premises Internet connectivity is in need of reassessment and revamping. It severely limits the nation’s ability to ensure all homes and businesses have fiber to the premise Internet connectivity capable of serving both current and future needs as bandwidth demand continues to grow exponentially.
 

Call it the Levin quagmire, named after former U.S. Federal Communications Commission official Blair Levin. In 2012, Levin predicted little change in the status quo, noting for most Americans over the near term, the best wireline network available to them will be the same one they have now. According to the FCC, for about 19 million Americans that’s dialup, state of the art technology in the early 1990s when Bill Clinton was starting his first term as president.

Summed up, these are the circumstances and policies that have produced the current quagmire:

• There is an insufficient business case for legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies to invest in building out their networks to serve all premises in their service areas or to upgrade existing infrastructure to fiber to the premise service. Nevertheless, these providers generally don’t avail themselves of federal and state subsidy programs aimed at capitalizing the cost of Internet infrastructure.
  

• Federal subsidy programs such as the Connect America Fund are only available to telephone companies and not cable companies that are becoming the dominant premises Internet service providers over telephone companies that are instead concentrating their capital investments on mobile wireless markets.

• Legacy incumbent telephone and cable providers view their service territories as proprietary franchises. Consequently, they oppose the award of subsidies to alternative providers and lobby for subsidy program eligibility rules inappropriately based on mobile wireless service and outmoded and changing standards of Internet service. They also lobby for state laws that bar local governments from building and operating fiber to the premise networks or make it impractical to do so.

Net neutrality debate underlies strategic tensions between legacy telcos, cablecos and content providers

Underlying the public policy issue of whether the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has legal authority to bar Internet service providers from treating the Internet as a private toll road and charging higher fees for digital express lanes – a policy known as “net neutrality” – are deep tensions between legacy telephone and cable companies and content providers. The courts are now addressing the legality of this policy, with the question to potentially come before the U.S. Supreme Court. But how the tensions between big telephone and cable companies and Internet content and social media services are resolved in the marketplace could ultimately have a much bigger impact than the courts.

The telephone and cable companies maintain they need revenue from content providers to offset CAPex and OPex costs of the infrastructure to deliver the services and as such are entitled to payment for access to their networks. In short, their position is they can charge for access on both ends of the Internet: where services like Netflix enter their “pipes” as then-AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre famously described them in 2007 and also at consumer premises where they are delivered. From the perspective of the content and service providers, given end users pay for access, they too shouldn’t have to pay to get content on network. And to boot, a network they view as technologically deficient and unable to provide sufficient current and future bandwidth as evidenced by Google’s limited venture into fiber the premise (FTTP) infrastructure via its Google Fiber unit. The incumbent inferiority gap has been recognized by former FCC official Blair Levin, who observes that big telco and cable companies have no plans to meaningfully upgrade and build out their networks.

While the courts will ultimately provide a tactical win to one side or the other on the issue of net neutrality, the strategic market tension between the sides over who owns and operates Internet infrastructure and who pays for it will nevertheless remain. How might it be resolved?

A possible scenario is the formation of an alliance among the big content providers and the Internet backbone transport players with the mission of dislodging the telco/cable cartel and its moribund, slow-moving pre-Internet business model. Call it the nuclear FTTP overbuild option. Given the hundreds of billions of dollars required to build out FTTP in the United States, a strategic initiative on such a massive scale would likely have to be a public-private partnership with private members such as like Level 3, Cogent Communications, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Ebay,Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Twitter as well as entities involved in the telehealth, distance education and the emerging markets of smart homes and the device-driven “Internet of things.” The federal government would be the public partner, providing capital through long term bonds to finance a strategic national Internet initiative to replace lethargic, highly contentious subsidy efforts such as the Connect America Fund that could take decades –if ever – to construct adequate Internet infrastructure serving all Americans.

Big Bandwidth Can Unlock a New Competitive Advantage - Blair Levin - Voices - AllThingsD

Big Bandwidth Can Unlock a New Competitive Advantage - Blair Levin - Voices - AllThingsD

I haven't always seen eye to eye with Blair Levin, lead author of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan issued in 2010 shortly before he joined the Aspen Institute think tank that year.  However, the above linked opinion article by Levin recently published in All Things D includes a number of statements with which I heartily agree.

First, Levin seems to be abandoning his prior stance that the private sector alone must invest in the massive, multi-billion dollar build of the necessary telecommunications infrastructure America needs to be competitive in an information based economy.  Levin now shares my view that incumbent, investor owned incumbent providers aren't in a position to do so because of their need to pay large dividends in the case of telcos and service high debt loads in the case of cable companies. "When it comes to wireline access to the Internet, instead of discussing upgrades, we are discussing bandwidth caps, tiers and rising prices. Instead of witnessing investment for growth, we are witnessing harvesting for dividends," Levin observes.
 
Levin also appears to have had an epiphany on what premises telecommunications service should be capable of delivering. Two years ago, Levin advocated for the subsidization of infrastructure than could deliver the FCC's minimum throughput standard of 4 Mbs down and 1 Mbs up to nearly all premises by 2020.  Levin now advocates what Andrew Cohill and others have dubbed "big broadband" (I prefer Levin's term, "big bandwidth"), perhaps not surprisingly since Levin also recently founded Gig U, an organization that Levin writes will build "gigabit hubs in nearly a dozen communities across the country, as well as a project to bring a 25X+ upgrade to hundreds of communities in rural America."  As to the latter project, this is the first I've heard of it and will be watching closely since it is these communities and not the university towns prioritized by Gig U that have the greatest need, being effectively disconnected from the Internet and relegated to substandard dialup and satellite connections.

I also found myself in strong agreement with Levin's call for a massive attitudinal shift away from the current mindset of bandwidth poverty fostered by incumbent providers who want to create the impression that more bandwidth cannot be created and therefore must be rationed and assessed a price premium.  Levin instead calls for a  “psychology of bandwidth abundance:” 

This psychology is what has fueled the uniquely American spirit of experimentation and innovation — from the first wave of European immigrants to the post-World War II America that helped rebuild Europe and Asia and created our modern economy and unleashed huge new industries from transportation to telecommunications. Unfortunately, however, the current environment suggests that we aren’t building that foundation. International studies on wireline bandwidth use differ, but all suggest we are mid-tier at best, and declining. 

Lest anyone doubt that the United States stands at a policy crossroads when it comes to upgrading its outdated telecommunications infrastructure, Levin notes that "[f]or the first time since American ingenuity birthed the commercial Internet, we do not have a single national wireline provider with plans 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."  Levin's absolutely right on this point.

Finally, Levin notes this dismal state of affairs where accessing the Internet in 2017 will for many Americans be much like it was three decades before is not inevitable.  Levin is correct when he suggests that we must find ways to lower the cost of building needed infrastructure rather than shrugging and claiming it is simply out of reach:

We can regain leadership by improving the math for wireline investment through policy choices that have the effect of lowering capital or operating expenses or by raising the potential revenues or competitive threat to incumbents or new entrants. We have done this before. In fact, every new communications network deployment or upgrade has been preceded by a policy change that had one or more of these impacts. 

Verizon misses on price points for higher tier FiOS service

There are four key elements to a successful business offering: product, price, promotion and distribution channel. When it comes to the high end of its FiOS fiber to the premises (FTTP) Internet service, Verizon has most but not all of those elements.

The missing element? Price. At $200 a month for service providing downstream connectivity of 150 Mbit/s and 35 Mbit/s on the upside, "nobody's buying," reports Kathy Brown, Verizon's senior vice president for public policy according to this Light Reading story. Even in university towns, where Aspen Institute fellow and former government broadband policy guru Blair Levin wants to explore bringing gigabit service through his Gig.U project. Consumers, Brown notes, instead opt for cheaper service tiers providing connectivity at lower speeds.

Of course few are interested in buying Verizon's higher end service at $200 a month. That's an unacceptable price for most consumers. It's also an expected consequence of telco marketing strategy that rations bandwidth, creating an economic disincentive for customers to use more. Products and services cannot be successful when price points are set unrealistically high. It is also pointless to blame consumers for not buying when they are.

Blair Levin perpetuates false distinction among IP-based services

Blair Levin, in another recent interview looking back on the U.S. National Broadband Plan he lead authored for the Federal Communications Commission before becoming an Aspen Institute fellow this summer, perpetuates a false distinction among Internet Protocol (IP)-based telecommunications services. IP-based services include Internet applications such as web browsing, email and e-commerce as well as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and video, also known as Internet Protocol TV (IPTV).

In an interview with Marguerite Reardon of cnet news, Levin does so by differentiating VOIP and IPTV from Internet applications. Levin -- as do many incumbent legacy phone and cable companies -- continues to describe the latter as "broadband." That term was appropriate in the mid-1990s when "broadband" denoted a premium service offered by telephone companies over their single purpose, proprietary copper cable plants. But as fiber optic cable technology increasingly obsoletes metal wire for delivering multiple IP-based services, the term is no longer relevant.

Levin reinforces this artificial split by talking about "broadband adoption." That too was relevant in the 1990s when broadband was being offered as a premium service, requiring customers to sign up for or "adopt" it. Today, it no longer is when Internet applications, voice and video can be delivered to consumers over a single fiber "pipe."

Further reinforcing the bogus notion of "broadband adoption," Levin elaborates that "broadband" requires consumers to be literate whereas voice and video do not. Therefore, Levin implies, we first need to improve the literacy of Americans to drive "broadband adoption" before the nation revamps its outmoded telecom infrastructure with fiber. Here's what he told Reardon:

Even though there are a lot of low-income people who may not be able to afford multi-channel video (cable TV), there is still a high proportion of people subscribing to the service. And people are not leaving in huge numbers. The big difference between TV and broadband is that to watch TV, you don't have to be literate. The same is true of phone service. You don't need to be literate to use a cell phone, so penetration of those services is higher. But to use broadband for things, such as getting access to public services, health care, job training, etc., a basic level of literacy is necessary. It requires a skill set. And teaching people those skills is a serious effort. So price is a piece of it, but literacy and relevance are also aspects too.

This is so much sophistry. Moreover, even if one accepts Levin's false dichotomy between Internet applications on one hand and voice and video on the other, it would argue for a bigger push to deploy fiber optic telecom infrastructure since video requires the "fat pipe" bandwidth fiber can provide.

National Broadband Plan overly reliant on wireline, author says

Blair Levin, the Aspen Institute fellow who served as lead author of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan before leaving the FCC this summer, told PCWorld last week the plan is flawed because it places too much emphasis on making landline Internet protocol-based telecommunications service accessible to all Americans.

"One of the problems we were running up against and that we should've been clearer about is that the conventional wisdom says the primary metric for measuring the validity or power of a national broadband plan is the speed of the wireline network to the most rural of residents," Levin is quoted as saying. "That way of looking at the problem is entirely wrong, is profoundly wrong -- almost every word in the sentence I just uttered is wrong. And we should've done a better job of explaining that."

If Levin could go back and rewrite the plan, landline and wireless technology would be framed synergistically, working in conjunction with each other to make a more complete telecommunications infrastructure that meets the National Broadband Plan's objective of expanding service availability to all Americans.

On this point, I agree with Levin. Until the last and middle miles of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure can be fully upgraded to fiber, wireless has an important but interim role to play since it can be deployed more quickly than wireline plant. That's a very important consideration given that the FCC reported in late July that between 14 and 24 million Americans "still lack access to broadband, and the immediate prospects for deployment to them are bleak."

However, if Levin sees wireless connectivity as a replacement for fiber, I disagree. Wireless telecommunications is largely designed for mobile use and not to serve premises. Wireless also lacks fiber's ability to handle the exploding demand for bandwidth. There is no field-proven wireless technology that matches fiber's capacity to accommodate that growth.

As Tim Nulty, who believes fiber to the premises can pencil out even in rural areas, put it in a 2008 interview, fiber optic plant is to wireless as jumbo jets are to helicopters. "Think about 747s and helicopters,” Nulty told The Progressive magazine. “Helicopters are marvelous when they’re used for what they’re good at. But you don’t use them to fly thousands of people between Boston and Chicago. For that you need 747s.”

America's badly needed revamp of its telecommunications infrastructure should not be based on the expectation that wireless technology will overtake and render fiber wireline plant obsolete and cost ineffective. Hope is a good attitude, but does not a plan make.

Blair Levin stuck in the failed paradigm of investor owned telecom infrastructure

Blair Levin, who exited as executive director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in May to become a fellow at the Aspen Institute, has penned a white paper issued last week by the think tank calling for retasking the Universal Service Fund (USF) from subsidizing basic telephone service in high cost areas to defraying the cost of deploying advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

Specifically, Levin advocates $10 billion in USF funding subsidize infrastructure capable of supporting the FCC's current minimum throughput standard of 4 Mbs down and 1 Mbs up to nearly all premises by 2020. Levin also proposes using USF funding to support "the adoption of broadband by low-income Americans and other non-adopter communities."

Levin's paper is based on some fundamental flaws. Levin has confined his thinking to the investor owned telco paradigm whose market failure is responsible for the inadequate, incomplete and outmoded telecom infrastructure that plagues much of the United States today in rural, quasi rural and metro areas. This infrastructure needs a massive revamping and it won't happen with just $10 billion in USF subsidies. In an interim report on its National Broadband Plan released in September 2008, the FCC estimated it would cost as much as $350 billion to build next generation telecom infrastructure to serve 100 million American homes. Ten billion dollars by comparison would barely make a dent.

This isn't to argue for much larger USF subsidies to telcos. Instead of appropriating $10 billion to subsidize infrastructure that will be obsolete well before 2020, the U.S. should face the fact that incumbent investor owned telcos simply can't afford to deploy the next generation of Internet protocol-based telecommunications infrastructure in a timely manner. The business case just doesn't pencil out. AT&T essentially conceded this point in a Dec. 21, 2009 filing with the FCC, pointing to the "enormous" amount of capital necessary to complete the build out of required infrastructure to ensure all Americans have access to IP-based services just as basic telephone service is nearly universal.

Instead of Levin's failed private market model, the U.S. instead should support policies that treat advanced telecommunications infrastructure as a public infrastructure like roads and highways such as advocated by Andrew Cohill and others. Allowing the private sector to attempt to build this vital infrastructure is economically untenable.

Levin's proposed use of USF monies to support "adoption of broadband by low-income Americans and other non-adopter communities" unfortunately amplifies a cynical canard advanced by legacy telcos and their astroturf groups. The unstated goal is to lower expectations and keep the calendar fixed in 1999 when Americans were just beginning to adopt "broadband" and "high speed" Internet access in personal computing. The Internet protocol-based infrastructure America needs now and in the future isn't just about computers connecting to the Internet for email and viewing web pages. It will support voice, video, teleconferencing, telework, telemedicine and uses that haven't yet been conceived.

Obama proposes additional funds for broadband infrastructure

President Barack Obama said in a speech today at the Brookings Institution that more federal subsidies are forthcoming for broadband infrastructure as part of a renewed effort to create badly needed jobs. Whatever the amount, it will supplement the $7.2 billion already allocated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Obama signed into law in February.

Here's the relevant excerpt from a transcript of the president's remarks posted on the White House Web site:

Second, we're proposing a boost in investment in the nation's infrastructure beyond what was included in the Recovery Act, to continue modernizing our transportation and communications networks. These are needed public works that engage private sector companies, spurring hiring all across the country.

Already, more than 10,000 of these projects have been funded through the Recovery Act. And by design, Recovery Act work on roads, bridges, water systems, Superfund sites, broadband networks, and clean energy projects will all be ramping up in the months ahead.

Whatever the additional amount agreed to by the president and Congress, there's still a long way to go given the consensus view that the $7.2 billion in the economic stimulus package represents a mere down payment on what the U.S. needs to invest to modernize its outmoded and incomplete telecommunications infrastructure as Blair Levin, the Federal Communications Commission's broadband czar, generally described the amount as the Obama administration prepared to take office one year ago.

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.

FCC: More subsidies needed for U.S. telecom infrastructure

Just days before President Barack Obama took office this year, his then-technology advisor and now Federal Communications Commission broadband czar Blair Levin told the State of the Net Conference that the $6 billion allocated for broadband infrastructure in the forthcoming American Recovery and Reinvestment Act represented only a portion of the new administration's planned efforts to boost broadband deployment in the U.S. (Congress increased that amount to $7.2 billion in the final version of the bill.)

The FCC clearly signaled more robust federal subsidies will be needed in an update released Tuesday on its progress and plans toward developing an overall broadband build out strategy to achieve universal access as required by the economic stimulus legislation.

Current subsidies including the the $7.2 billion in grants and loan subsidies contained in the economic stimulus package "are insufficient to achieve national purposes," the FCC said in a Sept. 29 news release. The reason as explained in the news release: $20 billion in subsidies would be needed to fully deploy slow speed "basic" broadband that would be quickly outmoded. 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 number rises to $350 billion.