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Wed, Feb 06, 2008

Report urges US to think 'big' about

broadband
Higher-ed group says it's time for nationwide, open access to high-
speed internet service
By Jessica Weiss, Online Editor, eSchool News

A new report from the higher education community calls on the federal government,
state governments, and the private sector to come together to solve what has been
called a U.S. “crisis” in high-speed internet connectivity. The report's findings
differed sharply from assertions contained in a document issued several days later
by the U.S. Commerce Department.
The 74-page report, “A Blueprint for Big Broadband,” was released last week by
Educause, a nonprofit association working to advance higher education through the
use of information technology. It says the demand for bandwidth in the United
States has accelerated well beyond the capacity of current broadband networks—a
problem that has enormous implications for U.S. education. “Big Broadband” refers
to the report’s vision: nationwide, open access to high-speed internet service.
In recent years, the advancement of internet applications such as video
conferencing, video streaming, voice-over-IP telephony, gaming, distance
education, and social networking has effectively “outstripped the network,” says
Wendy Wigen, an Educause policy analyst and the report’s lead researcher.
To ensure universal access to the full range of services and opportunities offered by
the internet, the report calls for greater broadband services with a minimum
capacity of 100 megabits per second (Mbps).
At U.S. colleges and universities, Wigen says, the continued growth of distance
education is dependent on better, faster, and more reliable internet service,
especially to students’ homes. At colleges and universities, Wigen reports, the
greatest “bottleneck” occurs in what she calls the “last mile or the first mile”—the
connection directly to the campus or to the student.
This is dangerous, Wigen cautions, because campuses historically have been the
country’s hubs of innovation. With 80 percent of U.S. students and nearly 100
percent of U.S. faculty and staff living off campus, America can’t afford to have the
students and staff conducting the high-level research that puts the nation ahead
using dial-up internet service, Wigen says.
Most developed nations have deployed or are deploying big broadband networks
that provide faster connections at cheaper prices than those available in the U.S.,
the report says. Japan already has announced a national commitment to build fiber
networks to every home and business, according to the report, and countries that
have smaller economies and more rural territory than the United States, such as
Finland, Sweden, and Canada, have “better broadband.”
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Foreign governments have found the resources to subsidize widely deployed

broadband in many cases by treating broadband as “necessary infrastructure,”
Wigen says, much like highways, roads, electrical grids, hospitals, and airports.
To take the burden from any one part of the economy, the report recommends a
new shared “universal broadband fund” (UBF) to cover the approximately $100
billion it would cost to build out U.S. networks, which would involve building local
fiber networks to every home and business in America. The federal government,
state governments, and private industry each could contribute one-third of the cost,
the report suggests.
Since 2002, the Canadian government has had a strong policy to get broadband out
to everyone, Wigen says. Canada’s public-private partnership model works much
like the proposed UBF would, with one-third of the funding provided by the federal
government, one-third by the individual province, and the remaining one-third by
the private sector.
The Educause report calls for a plan that (a) includes the coordinated effort of
elected leaders; (b) is implemented by a core of federal, state, and local officials,
with guidance from an advisory committee of commercial and nonprofit institutions;
(c) includes tax incentives to spur private-sector broadband investment; (d)
encourages public-sector investment by municipalities and states; (e) ensures that
the public is made aware of the availability of broadband services; and (f) provides
additional funding to bolster U.S. investment in long-term telecommunications
research.
The return on “big broadband” would be tremendous, Wigen argues. For one thing,
such a network would be less expensive to operate than the existing copper
network, she says, resulting in actual cost savings of several billion dollars per year.
Furthermore, because fiber is “scalable upwards to an almost unlimited capacity,”
the investment in building these networks could provide broadband connectivity for
several decades. And finally, once the networks are built, the need for additional
funding would end, and the private and/or public entity that receives the funding
would own and operate the network without the need for ongoing federal subsidies.
The Educause report came just a few days before the Bush administration released
a report of its own, touting its progress in rolling out affordable access to high-speed
internet service across the United States.
“Networked Nation: Broadband in America,” prepared by the Commerce
Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA),
is an upbeat assessment of the administration’s efforts to spur growth and
competition in the high-speed internet market. It concludes that the objective of
affordable access to broadband for all has been realized “to a very great degree.”
The NTIA report drew its conclusion using data from the Federal Communications
Commission and other sources. The FCC reported that more than 99 percent of all
U.S. ZIP codes received broadband service from at least one provider by the end of
2006.
Critics, however, say the FCC’s data are misleading. A broadband provider has to
serve only a single residence in a ZIP code for it to be counted. Also, the FCC defines
broadband as 200 kilobits per second. That’s about four times the speed of a good
dial-up connection—barely fast enough to stream video.
“The notion that a 200-kilobit connection is broadband is … ludicrous,” said Derek
Turner, research director for Free Press, a nonprofit public interest group that
studies media and technology issues.
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Educause released its report Jan. 29 during pre-conference events at the State of
the Net Conference held in Washington, D.C. During that event, one FCC
Commissioner, Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, thanked Educause for encouraging the
federal government to take the lead in broadband development. Copps said his only
wish was that “the FCC had [written] it.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report