March 2010

[Commentary] The National Broadband Plan may be too ambitious for many inside Washington to fully embrace in terms of executing legislation and making funds available. The average lawmaker, particularly with elections coming up this year, could care less about broadband. These are the ones most susceptible to lobbyists' attempts to neuter the plan, which make no mistake, they are in full Destruct mode. The telecom and cable industry will mine the lofty rhetoric while trying to kill anything they feel threatens profits. On the other hand, the plan is not ambitious enough for some when you consider one glaring vulnerability. In some people's mind, they feel it does not grab by the throat the main source of our many problems with broadband - the lack of competition and the ease with which the incumbents can kill competition.

"Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing," opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan titled "Availability."

What would that mean in terms of performance?

"An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access," the NBP says. The document calls this the "National Broadband Availability Target."

But how do we get there, given the agency's estimate that 100 million Americans do not have broadband at home?

The NBP's most prominent answer is to recommend an additional infusion of $24 billion in public support to supplement private investment in broadband infrastructure over the next decade. The much more complex half of the plan is to do battle with that vast mess which is the government's Universal Service Fund (USF) and Intercarrier Compensation (ICC) programs. These huge deployments ($8.7 billion in funding for USF this year) subsidize rural and poor telephone subscribers across the country, but wastefully so, and they don't require or even encourage providers to offer broadband. So the strategy of the NBP is to gradually sweep the illogic of USF and ICC out and bring in new, broadband-oriented support systems.

The Plan says it can get this done in ten years. Here's how.

Fine-grained network controls that are coming with next-generation mobile technology could make some demanding mobile applications such as video perform better but may also raise Network Neutrality concerns.

LTE (Long-Term Evolution), the fourth-generation (4G) mobile technology expected to be most widely adopted by carriers around the world, is designed to boost wireless data speeds and more efficiently serve subscribers. But along with that standard come others that define the IP network behind the cell towers. One of them, called PCRF (Packet Core Routing Function), will give carriers much more fine-grained control over how well applications and services perform.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition today released a white paper prepared by IDC called "Assessing the Mobile DTV Opportunity and Its Role in the United States' Communication Ecosystem." TVNewsCheck provides excerpts from the paper's executive summary.

Mobile DTV is a cultural and technical extension of digital over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting and is a spectrum-efficient technology to deliver hugely popular content. But more than this, Mobile DTV allows consumers to also receive local channels, programming, and advertising, as well as relevant local and national news, emergency information, weather, and other alerts. Like OTA broadcasting, mobile DTV makes possible a one-to-many broadcast that instantaneously can reach millions of viewers.

The era of mobile video services has arrived, and live mobile TV is a core component of a compelling video service offering for consumers. Mobile DTV broadcasts have begun for an estimated 45 stations today, and approximately 150 stations are expected to be on air by the end of 2010. Within three years, it is feasible that several hundred stations will broadcast mobile DTV, reaching upwards of 100 or more markets.

In these early days, IDC expects broadcasters to deliver ad-supported free OTA access to drive OEM and retailer support and educate consumers about the feature. Longer term, IDC believes increased mobile video offerings across various portable device categories will drive new monetization for broadcasters, advertisers, and potentially OEMs and carriers.

It should not be a question of broadcast or broadband. Both are critical communications technologies that serve a distinct purpose and work better when they are coupled together. Mobile DTV is truly a complementary service to streamed and on-demand services because it can efficiently deliver services and live content that are hugely popular and/or highly localized to consumers, while two-way networks can be integrated onto the same device to offer more personalized experiences and content.