Internet/Broadband

For a plan that puts "competition" as its number one goal, the National Broadband Plan is remarkably light on policies that will produce much of it in the wireline space.

The National Broadband Plan includes an assumption that competition is a good thing, that having multiple facilities-based competitors unencumbered by government regulation will create a healthy broadband marketplace. But there's a downside to unfettered, market-driven competition.

Rep Cliff Stearns (R-FL), one of the first lawmakers to criticize the Federal Communications Commission's national broadband plan, is now retreating from some of his initial comments.

The National Broadband Plan aims to speed up and expand broadband access, which are both big problems: 35 percent of adult Americans lack high-speed Internet access at home, and those who do connect at slower speeds than residents of other countries. But this set of blueprints doesn't represent much of a change from the existing market for high-speed Internet access.

A crucial side-battle in this week's release of the National Broadband Plan - and likely a long, drawn out one at that - is the tussle over whether existing spectrum currently allocated to TV broadcasters should be dedicated to broadband services.

Broadcast spectrum has long been a scarce and precious resource. In recent years, though, with the explosive growth in the number of users of cellular phones, smartphones and wireless broadband cards, it's come to resemble Manhattan real estate: in huge demand, with pressure to develop any parcel that seems underutilized. Those pressures are sure to increase under the National Broadband Plan unveiled last week by the FCC.

The Federal Communications Commission is releasing the raw data files that were the basis for the "Broadband Adoption and Use in America" working paper. The Broadband Data Improvement Act directed the Commission to "conduct and make public periodic surveys of consumers" as part of the FCC's efforts to understand who uses broadband, who does not, and, if not, why people do not subscribe. The FCC released the results of the survey on February 23rd, and today it makes available to the public the underlying data for the survey.

Free Press on February 22, 2010, filed a request to "review data collected by the Federal Communications Commission in connection with its periodic inquiry into the deployment of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans." Interested parties may file comments on or before April 19, 2010, and reply comments on or before May 4, 2010.

The Federal Communications Commission plans to begin a process in a few months aimed at auctioning airwaves that failed to garner enough interest during the 2008 spectrum auction.

The Federal Communications Commission is promoting how its National Broadband Plan could enhance public-safety activities with a new Web page on the agency's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau site.