December 2009

Never before has a virus gone viral like this. There are swine flu blogs and swine flu tweets, swine flu videos on YouTube and swine flu groups on Facebook. The arrival of the H1N1 virus, and young people's vulnerability to it, have forced public health agencies to muster new media with unprecedented fervor. It's a matter, disease specialists said, of going where the young audience is.

[Commentary] Even before the state of Colorado released on Dec. 1 the results of a broadband mapping project conducted by a Connected Nation subsidiary, officials were preparing for a second round of mapping. The problem, according to the state Request for Proposals issued in early November, is that the first mapping product done by Connect Colorado "did not satisfy the requirements" of the federal broadband mapping program. The first mapping project cost $300,000. The telecom industry contributed $60,000 of that total and the state paid for the rest. On November 30, the day before the state released the Connected Nation results, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced it had awarded Colorado they had received $2.1 million in broadband mapping and planning funds for a second round of broadband mapping. Of that total, $1.6 million would go to mapping and the balance for broadband planning. The report caused an immediate sensation with the statistic that "Connect Colorado found that 97.53 percent of Colorado households have broadband service available of at least 768 kbps downstream and at least 200 kbps upstream to the end user at the address available." Here is how a service is determined to be "available," according to the report: "Broadband service is considered 'available' to an end user at an address if a broadband service provider does, or could, within a typical service interval (7 to 10 business days) without an extraordinary commitment of resources, provision two-way data transmission to and from the Internet with speeds of at least 768 kbps downstream and least 200 kbps upstream."

[Commentary] One of Daily's biggest pet peeves in broadband debates is the over-emphasis on download speeds and the lack of sufficient attention being paid to upload speeds. When talking about bandwidth goals, they're download first, upload second. When providers are advertising the capacity of their networks, it's the download number in big font, with upload hidden elsewhere. Often times this devolves into people referring to broadband only based on its download capacity. This causes a serious problem for consumer awareness about upstream capacity. If providers with inadequate upstream capacity aren't talking about it then the average consumer may not realize the difference in the value they're receiving for their broadband buck, which calls into question the efficacy of a market where customers aren't making informed decisions. We should count all bandwidth equally when defining the service level that broadband delivers. Rather than allowing providers to tout their downstream speeds in bold and hide their upstream, they should be required to most prominently display the total bandwidth they're providing. So if a provider offers a service that promises 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up then they'd have to say their broadband service is offering 55Mbps of total bandwidth.

The $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funding is not even close to enough to deploy truly universal broadband access, according to a new study from Insight Research. The company estimates that half the US households either use dial-up access or lack Internet service and projects that an estimated 40 million households will still lack broadband access by the end of 2014. The firm then takes that figure and divides it by the actual amount of money going toward deployment on broadband to determine that the government has allocated just $164 per household. Insight Research claims that it takes about $1,500 per household to deploy broadband, bringing the amount of money needed for universal access to $60 billion.