Competition missing from broadband plan, some say

The sweeping national broadband plan that federal regulators delivered to Congress last week doesn't go far enough to satisfy some experts who warn that the United States would still trail other industrialized nations in prices and speed.

Those experts insist that the FCC plan is not nearly ambitious enough to bring faster Internet connections at lower prices by producing more competition. They say the proposal fails to address the fundamental cause of the problem: a duopoly broadband market controlled by giant phone and cable TV companies. According to the New America Foundation, a 100-megabit broadband connection costs as little $16 a month in Sweden and $24 a month in South Korea, while service that is only half that fast costs $145 a month in the U.S. "What I want is big bandwidth for cheap prices," said Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. "But the plan punts on competition."

Meinrath, for one, takes issue with one of the plan's signature goals: delivering broadband connections of 100 megabits per second — at least 20 times faster than most residential services today — to 100 million U.S. households by 2020. Meinrath believes this sets up the U.S. to slip even further behind in the international broadband race because the goal it sets for the rest of country — most likely rural America — puts minimum speeds at a paltry 4 megabits downstream. "A national broadband plan should be bold and visionary and this isn't," Meinrath said. "This is like entering the race and saying: 'Let's go for last place.' "