National Broadband Plan author talks about his regrets

A Q&A with Blair Levin, the Federal Communications Commission staffer who led the team that wrote the National Broadband Plan.

He said that while the FCC rolled out the plan, it could have done a better job of explaining some of the ideas behind it as opposed to simply the policy recommendations. The most important thing to understand, he said, is that broadband is not important in and of itself. It is important because it is the vehicle of knowledge exchange, which turns out to be an incredibly important driver of economic and job growth and critical for a civic society.

He noted 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. The correct approach, however, is that it's not a primary metric, it's an ecosystem. And if you think there's a single factor that measures something, you don't understand how what you want is a constantly improving platform for knowledge exchange. So you want networks, devices, applications and, most importantly, people interacting to constantly improve how they operate. The one that's most wrong is the speed. Speed is the input and use is the output. We should be thinking about how we use it because the real upside is not in increasing speed, it's in increasing the applications. A third thing is that it's almost always about wireline and it turns out wireless is going to be the key driver of growth in the next decade. On the institutional side, speed is incredibly important but what we found was for most of the country speeds are actually pretty good. I would say that 4G is going to end up being more important to more people over the next couple of years than increases in wireline speed.