Defining 'broadband' key in stimulus plans

As information begins to emerge regarding President-Elect Barack Obama's plans to include broadband in his sweeping economic stimulus proposals, a key question remains: At what speed will the new administration define "broadband" for the purpose of its goals? The question of how to define broadband has long been a challenging one for many proponents of universal broadband. When asked last summer at what speed Obama's administration might define broadband, Blair Levin, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus who is now a key member of Obama's transition team focused on broadband, told Telephony, "Part of it depends on what feature sets happen in the future. I don't think we'll define universal service as that necessary to carry Cisco's telepresence, for example. But we may get to a level of video; who knows. I think there's a growing consensus that universal service, as it is today, ought to [allow one to] be capable of doing Web-surfing, VoIP, information gathering - those kinds of things. And we want that to be available in roughly 100% of the country. And we'd like to achieve penetration rates similar to what we've achieved in voice." He added, speaking only for himself, "Here's the way I think service providers will think about it. What is the speed which qualifies you that I can achieve but disqualifies some of my potential competitors? In other words, if you can achieve 3m, but your wireless guys are never going to get there, you want that to be, in order to qualify, you want that to be the level."