Welcome to BroadbandCensus.com

By Mercy Gakii, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com; and Rahul Gaitonde, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, October 15, 2009 - Six public interest organizations, including Consumers Union, on Wednesday filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission urging the agency to protect consumers from misleading and confusing advertising and billing practices by phone, cable and wireless providers. The consumer groups argue that current protections are insufficient and urge the FCC to require meaningful, not misleading, disclosure. These groups would like to force billing and advertising practices which are more transparent and easier to understand. These companies often offer introductory rates and special offers to some customers which then change without consumers knowing in advance when their rates will be affected. The other organizations were Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, Media Access Project, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge. "When consumers have the facts, they can make informed choices," said Chris Riley, policy counsel of Free Press. "Consumers are being bombarded with inconsistent and incomplete information when shopping for service providers or plans, and then they are baffled by misleading and confusing bills once they sign up. Customers invest a lot of money in these services and spend a great deal of time using them. That’s why the FCC must...

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Last week the Federal Communication Commission’s Broadband Taskforce delivered a status report on the national broadband plan. Below are edited excerpts of the key points points they made:

• Actual broadband speeds lag advertised speeds by at least 50% and possibly more during the busy hours. Peak usage hours, typically 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., create network congestion and speed degradation. About 1% of users drive 20% of traffic, while 20% of users drive up to 80% of traffic.
• Preliminary analysis indicates that approximately three to six million people are unserved by basic broadband (speeds of 768 Kbps or less).
• The incremental cost to universal availability varies significantly depending on the speed of service, with preliminary estimates showing that the total investment required ranging from $20 billion for 768 Mbps-3 Mbps service to $350 billion for 100 Mbps or faster.
• Nearly two-thirds of Americans have adopted broadband at home, while 33 percent have access but have not adopted it, and another 4% say they have no access where they live.
• Wireless is increasingly moving to broadband, with smartphone sales projected to overtake sales of standard phones by 2011.
• The driving force behind national broadband plans in other nations has been competitiveness, job creation and innovation. Successful plans...

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By Christina Kirchner, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, September 1, 2009 – State and local governments said during a Federal Communications Commission workshop on Tuesday that extending broadband is important for economic development purposes. Among the programs discussed at the workshop were those with the past goal of expanding broadband services into areas which were once inaccessible to any form of internet service, and providing education for these services. “Areas of the country that don’t have access to broadband services of at least 10 Megabits [per second (Mbps)] in the next five years will be as economically disadvantaged as those areas in the first half of the 20th century that did not have paved roads or electricity,” said Ray Baum, commissioner of the Oregon Public Utilities Commission and head of the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners committee on telecommunications. He said that 10 Mbps was the minimum necessary as the base of broadband for services, including health care and education. However, before the expansion of accessible broadband reaches rural areas, digital literacy, or education in the use of computers and broadband services is a necessity, said Jane Smith Patterson, executive director of e-NC Authority in North Carolina. “There was a development at the local level [called] public...

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WASHINGTON, August 12, 2009 - With just two days away from the deadline to apply for federal funds to cultivate broadband projects across the nation, telecommunications experts offered their advice on the future of the grants process. Casey Lide, an attorney with the Baller Herbst Law Group, said during the webinar hosted by Governing.com that he believes there will be two more rounds of funding for these types of projects although acknowledged that a third round isn’t guaranteed. Lide expects future rounds may not focus as intently on getting broadband to the unserved and underserved parts of the country, as the first round has done. “There was quite a lot of surprise and disappointment [about that focus] among the local government community,” he said. “There was a perception that…the program focused too much on the unserved and underserved” at the expense of other, innovative high-bandwidth projects. He sees the first round of funding as an attempt to create a “thin skinned layer of broadband in rural areas of the country.” Lide said local folks are hoping that the next rounds will be “more friendly” to local governments and municipalities. Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs Jeff Arnold, who works for the National Association of Counties, said counties...

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By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story had a typographical error in the second paragraph, which has been fixed. WASHINGTON, May 14, 2009 - One of President Obama's top technology and economic policy officials said Thursday that broadband infrastructure is and must remain a key priority of the Obama administration. "Broadband is the new essential infrastructure," said National Economic Council official Susan Crawford. "Access to broadband does not guarantee" success, but "lack of access to broadband will guarantee economic decline." Crawford, speaking at a summit on "Changing Media," highlighted the importance of broadband technology not only to economic development, but also to education, health care, social needs, and the future of journalism. She said that Obama was very enthusiastic about the creation of a national broadband plan - a charge that was tasked to the Federal Communications Commission by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that passed in February. "The president mentions broadband all the time," Crawford said. As with others at the summit, which was sponsored by the non-profit advocacy group Free Press, Crawford highlighted the dire state of journalism, particularly print journalism. Noting that Obama addressed the future of journalism at last week's White House Correspondent's Dinner, and in his...

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News

By Andrew Feinberg, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com, and Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, February 13, 2009 – Advocates for federal promotion of broadband access breathed easier after a congressional conference committee reported a final version of the economic stimulus bill with $7.2 billion for broadband – more than either chamber had allocated individually. The conference report provided for a total of $7.2 billion dollars for broadband programs. $4.7 billion will be administered by the Commerce Department, and $2.5 billion will be administered by the Agriculture Department. The House version would have spent $6 billion on broadband. Although initial version of the Senate bill boosted the total to about $9 billion, the final Senate-passed measure put the total at $7.1 billion. The legislation is designed to increase broadband adoption and deployment in unserved and underserved areas, and in schools, libraries, and to low income Americans and the elderly. The bill also encourages deployment of broadband services to improve public safety communications among first responders. Some observers feared that the broadband section of the stimulus bill might be cut from the final conference report. But rather than reduce the amount of funding or remove the program entirely, the conference report included compromises on the amount and direction of funding...

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News

By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

Editor's note: This article has been corrected; see below. WASHINGTON, December 19 – Connected Nation and the American Library Association will receive a $7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a broadband initiative designed to improve internet connections in public libraries, the foundation said Thursday. The goal is to ensure that all public libraries within seven states – Arkansas, California, Kansas, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Virginia – have broadband connectivity of at least 1.5 Megabits per second (Mbps). Connected Nation will convene broadband summits within each of these “pilot” states. The states were chosen because they have large populations with individuals living below the poverty line, said Jill Nishi, deputy director of U.S. Libraries at the Gates Foundation. Despite overwhelming demand for technology services, up to one-third of all public libraries have internet connections too slow to meet the every needs of patrons, according to a recent report compiled by the American Library Association. In an interview, Nishi said that the 1.5 Mbps speed goal is a minimum, and that the foundation will strive to ensure higher speeds in the seven states. In June, the Federal Communications Commission raised its definition of broadband from internet connections...

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Blog Entries

By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

Editor's Note: This blog entry was originally posted as a response to a post on the Open Infrastructure Alliance listserv, about the National Broadband Strategy effort that Jim Baller, of Baller Herbst Law Group, has been shepherding. WASHINGTON, December 5 - I founded BroadbandCensus.com in January 2008 after my experience of trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain some very basic broadband information: the names of the carriers operating in each ZIP code. We have not yet succeeded in this task. We don't pretend that this data is in itself crucial or even important broadband information. Rather, it is a simple building block upon which citizen-users are empowered to build, through crowdsourcing, new layers of public information about speed, price, availability, reliability and competition. The fight to get data is still important, and it shouldn't be abandoned. Indeed, the possibility of getting this kind of data is the very reason that I am optimistic about the momentum that Jim Baller has been building behind this national broadband strategy. This is one key reason that BroadbandCensus.com is a proud signatory of the strategy statement. At the event on Tuesday, I stood up and asked Larry...

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