The FCC's Broadband Deployment Hearings

[Commentary] Last week, the Omnibus Broadband Initiative held a series of 7 panels addressing issues fundamental to bringing broadband to every American - the technologies that can supply broadband, and how they can and should be deployed. Several messages rang out loud and clear. First, panelist after panelist reminded us that getting the broadband plan will not only be a matter of plugging bitrates and marginal costs into a formula to yield a number, but also considering the challenge holistically and attempting to capture the entire economic impact of broadband. Second, whether your family or small business has "broadband" is not simply a matter of the peak speeds you can attain over your connection, if you currently have one; rather, it incorporates a host of other considerations, like latency and reliability, that impact the performance of applications like VoIP and collaborative office software. And finally, many of our experts on wireless technology emphasized the importance of spectrum to our national wireless future - both improving the efficiency of existing spectrum and exploring making spectrum available in frequencies currently occupied by other technologies, such as analog cable television. [Rob Curtis is Deployment Director of the FCC's Omnibus Broadband Initiative.]