Leading to the gigabit promised land?

[Commentary] US broadband pundits endlessly debate where we are instead of where we need to be, quarreling over interpretations of today's international broadband rankings or, in the case of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, urgently holding a hearing on a program that the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission already shut down. These discussions are about headlines, not about progress. By design, they only look backward, implicating the policies of previous generations. Worse, they distract us from tackling the real task at hand: how we help our country develop the infrastructure we need to lead in the 21st century information economy.

Press-driven, short-term thinking has consequences. Washington's habit of pointing fingers and obsessing about the past obviously hasn't convinced business leaders that future-proofing our country is a US priority. Wouldn't it be nice if, instead, we had hearings on what we need to do today to lead 5, 10, or 15 years hence? Surely, a timeless lesson of the last four books of the Old Testament is this: The point is not to debate one's location in the desert. It is to get to the Promised Land. In the US, old policies continue to drive private capital to outmoded networks, and FCC policies under the previous chair actually made it more difficult to build world-leading networks. Until recently, incumbent providers waved off communities' desires for next-generation networks, insisting that customers don't want higher speeds. Meanwhile, in our schools, when students take online assessments, the rest of the district must refrain from sending e-mail to avoid a network overload; our health care facilities find it quicker to send a thumb drive with CAT scan results via messenger than wait for the data to transfer; and a third of our homes don't even have broadband, which, among other things, is becoming the only way to apply for a job. We need to stop debating the past and start figuring out the future.

[Levin heads up the Gig.U project, a consortium of 36 research university communities seeking to accelerate the deployment of next generation networks]