The Next Phase of the Electronic Highway.
Universal broadband -- Big bucks beyond the
vision.
This week, President Bush called for universal
broadband service across the United States by 2007, but
neglected to mention the billions of dollars necessary to
implement it. This oversight means that his "vision" is simply a
hope without a real, achievable plan. In fact, the uncertainty
over how to pay for it is likely to make it harder to achieve
universal broadband.
American consumers want low-cost access to
high-speed Internet service. This "broadband" is hard to define
-- some call anything faster than dial-up service broadband,
while others claim true broadband is capable of carrying high-
quality real-time video images. Current high-speed services flow
at about 1 megabit/second. This means you can download music
fairly rapidly, but bigger files such as video are cumbersomely
slow. Future high-speed service is likely to be much faster than
what we consider "high-speed" today. With 10 to 100
megabit/second service, real-time video of high quality should
be a snap.
Broadband promises an array of valuable new
services and the potential to increase productivity and create
jobs. The broadband future sounds pretty rosy, but like all
roses, it comes with thorns. The problem is that providing the
next generation of broadband services across the country will
cost tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. The history
of Federal Communications Commission and state Public Utilities
Commission involvement in the universal deployment of narrowband
telephone service shows that regulators will probably increase
substantially the deployment cost and have little effect. As a
result, the president's call, by causing regulators to focus on
the "universal" part, could ironically end up delaying
competitive broadband deployment unless regulators (and
Congress) are told to limit their involvement to removing
barriers to providing broadband service provision.
