FCC likely to favor open access networks in forthcoming policy recommendation

The Federal Communications Commission is approaching a critical juncture in its congressionally mandated task of devising national policy to further advanced (broadband) telecommunications infrastructure build out. The issue facing the FCC is to what extent the nation emulate the open access network regulatory model used by other countries that have leaped past and made the U.S. and its proprietary, closed networks an also ran rather than a leader in deploying advanced, Internet protocol-based telecommunications.

The FCC commissioned a report suggesting that regulatory policy in the form of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act requiring telcos to unbundle their networks and allow providers of voice and Internet services to lease space on them had it right and that model needs to be embraced again. Here's a good summary of the study by Internetnews.com.

Look for the FCC will lean strongly toward open access in developing its plan due to Congress next February. The Obama administration stipulated that subsidies set aside for broadband infrastructure construction in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 be for open access networks. That sends a strong signal to the FCC where it stands on open access.

The incumbent duopoly telco and cable companies will protest open access will discourage them from investing in building out their proprietary networks. It's a non sequitur. They're already discouraged from doing so by the economics of their business models. Those models simply don't allow them to make the big investments in their network infrastructure necessary to allow the United States to catch up and bring its outdated telecommunications networks -- particularly over the last mile -- to where they need to be.

This isn't economic rocket science. The average consumer who has asked his or her local telco or cable company for years why the folks a couple miles away -- and often closer -- have broadband and they don't already knows this. They've been repeatedly told by customer service and field personnel -- when these personnel are being frank and direct -- that their neighborhoods simply cost too much to serve and they're SOL for the foreseeable.

Prince Charles warns of UK "broadband deserts"

The UK's broadband "not spots" are getting royal attention from the Prince of Wales. The BBC today reported Prince Charles wrote the Daily Telegraph to point out that "Too many rural households are currently unable to access the internet at satisfactory speeds."

As the Brits would say, Charles used rather extraordinary language to condemn the situation, calling the lack of investment in modern telecommunications infrastructure "vandalism on a grand scale" of rural economies.

From my perspective from across the Big Pond and on the other side of the North American continent, it seems a big contributor is inside the box thinking among our British friends. They appear stuck in the publicly switched voice telephone over copper network paradigm that can only deliver DSL -- and only so far. Instead, they and the rest of us need to be thinking in terms of advanced, second generation telecommunications over fiber to the premises delivering multiple digital services that copper was never designed to accommodate.

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.

Internet access -- not the coffee -- is likely primary attraction of U.S. coffee shops

MuniWireless has a summary and link to a social commentary piece that posits Americans go to coffee shops like Starbucks not so much for the coffee and baked goods or even the social ambiance savored -- slowly -- in European coffeehouses.

Instead, the draw is wireless high speed Internet access that has made U.S. coffee cafes more like public computing centers with patrons' making more eye contact with their laptop displays than other customers. (Query: I wonder if any U.S. coffee chains or shops applied for public computing center subsidies in broadband component of the economic stimulus package, especially during the current downturn that has customers buying fewer premium four dollar espresso drinks?)

Rather than socializing and conversing like their European coffeehouse counterparts, Americans are primarily there to get Internet access and to get work done -- or dash out the door with coffee to go in a paper cup instead of one made of china.

I suspect the difference between U.S. and European coffeehouses can't be fully ascribed to sociological factors. For many Americans, Starbucks and other retail coffee venues are about getting affordable broadband that can't be obtained at home due to the fractured and subpar state of premises-based advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

IP-based service convergence rendering broadband debate irrelevant

Comcast's move into digital voice in 2006, AT&T's disclosure to Investor's Business Daily two years ago that it ultimately plans to shut down its existing voice network and replace it with a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) system in the limited areas where its U-Verse offering is being deployed and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg's assertion at a Goldman Sachs investor conference last week that his company is migrating from the publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) and central offices designed to handle plain old telephone service (POTS) delivered over twisted pair copper wire to fiber to the premises (FTTP) all signal that wireline telecommunications is undergoing a paradigm shift.

The transition is away from the single purpose voice telephone and cable TV systems of the past to Internet-protocol based telecommunications infrastructure capable of delivering various media including high speed Internet connectivity, voice and video.

This paradigm shift is rendering the debate at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and elsewhere over what constitutes broadband Internet increasingly irrelevant. What's gaining importance isn't the download and upload speeds that have dominated the debate over defining broadband but rather how to ensure these various IP-based services can be reliably and economically delivered to end users.

That takes a new and improved telecommunications infrastructure. This emerging IP-based infrastructure and the business models that can most rapidly deploy and support it is what truly deserve attention going forward. The pointless back and forth over how to define broadband keeps the conversation oriented retrospectively to the 1990s instead of where it needs to be: forward into the 21st century.