Levin: Broadband Opportunities Council Mission Consistent with National Broadband Plan

[Commentary] The mission of the Broadband Opportunities Council (BOC) is critical for the economic and social progress of this country. I believe it is consistent with the fundamental vision of the National Broadband Plan, which I would summarize as ubiquitous, affordable, abundant bandwidth, with all Americans online, and using that platform to better deliver public goods and services. The Plan set forth four strategies to pursue that vision:

1. Drive Fiber deeper into the network
2. Use Spectrum more efficiently
3. Create the right incentives for adoption by all
4. Encourage the development of applications to improve the country's ability to make progress in certain national purposes, including health care, education, public safety, and energy, among others.

The BOC Request for Comment focuses on deployment and adoption, but it is important that the relationship between those goals and all four strategies is understood. Simply put, improvements in each can drive improvements in the others; bottlenecks in any can stifle progress in all. That is, for robust, encouraging adoption by increasing the value of being on-line, making applications that create public goods more valuable, and with those increasingly valuable applications driving greater value and adoption, the economics to improve the fixed and mobile network increase.