Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, September 3, 2009 – Federal Communications Commission broadband czar Blair Levin dismissed critics of the commission's process in creating a national broadband strategy and promised a steady push forward with clear goals in mind.
Levin spoke on Wednesday to a group of telecommunications attorneys and executives in downtown Washington.
Levin said he was puzzled as to the poor quality of the filings the commission received in July in response to the FCC's first notice of inquiry on plans for a national broadband strategy. To those who questioned the need for the filings and assumed Levin and agency Chairman Julius Genachowski had already predetermined the course of the broadband plan, he asked rhetorically, "if I know what I want to do [on broadband], why am I here?"
There is no "secret plan," nor "multiple choice" option that the commission will choose from, Levin cautioned. "It doesn't work like that," he said. Complicating the problem is a lack of good data on broadband availability nationwide. The U.S.'s mapping data "doesn't add up" enough to be useful, he said.
The workshops the commission has been conducting are to allow staff to take ownership of parts of the plan and narrow down...
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Thursday, August 20th, 2009
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, August 20, 2009 - One of the largest challenges in developing a national broadband plan will be to find out who has broadband, who doesn't and what it's used for, said FCC Consumer Research Director John Horrigan in opening remarks at a Wednesday staff workshop.
The agency's most recent seminar focused on building a fact base for the national strategy, which the FCC must present to Congress by February 2010.
Susannah Fox, associate director for digital strategy at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said 63 percent of Americans have home broadband service -- a "significant increase" over 2008. A "key point" of Pew's data shows broadband users value most the ability to share information with health care providers. Eighty percent of users have used broadband to find health care information online -- "the de facto second opinion," Fox said.
The survey found that consumers with broadband gain the ability to contribute information and communicate with others, as well as find rich media information on topics of interest, Fox said. Surveys did "not show a lot of harm" from consumers turning to the Internet for health care information, she added.
Income gaps between urban and rural areas...
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
By Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2009 - Over at
O'Reilly's Radar, Carl Malamud discusses the need for a crowdsourced national communiations census, or a broadband census.
He writes:
My last tour of duty in DC was Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress. One of the fun things I got to do was figure out what everybody else did, including my fellow Senior Fellows, the folks that generated most of the policy work, many of whom are now occupying senior posts in the new administration.
One of the most fascinating was Mark Lloyd. An experienced Emmy-winning television producer, communications lawyer, and community activist, Mark is the author of a well-regarded book aboutcommunications and democracy and numerous columns. He's currently at the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights.
The project Mark Lloyd was working on was a National Broadband Map to show our true communications capabilities. And, he wanted to crowd-source the map from community groups, supplementing that with census and other data from several different places to create a big mash-up. This was in 2005, around the same time Adrian Holovaty was thinking about chicagocrime.org.
Here's my reply on the O'Reilly...
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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
By Ryan Womack, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 17, 2009 - Last Friday's nationwide transition from analog to digital television doesn't mean a quick refocusing of manpower to broadband stimulus efforts at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, agency officials said.
Coupons for the analog-to-digital converter boxes used to facilitate the switch for households receiving over-the-air signals are valid 90 days from the transition date, said NTIA spokesman Bart Forbes.
This means NTIA must still receive and redeem coupons, and the joint NTIA-FCC call center will be open to field consumer questions well into September, he said. All the work going smoothing the last wrinkles of the transition means that the agency must continue to focus on it “into November, really.”
NTIA is also the lead agency responsible for distributing $7.2 billion dollars -- it has responsibility for $3.7 billion of that amount, versus $2.5 billion allocated to the Agriculture Department -- in federal stimulus dollars. All funds must be distributed by the September, 2010 deadline set by Congress in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, which President Obama signed into law this past February.
Of the funds the Act provides for broadband stimulus programs, $350 million are set to go towards broadband data and mapping...
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
By Ryan Womack, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 10, 2009 - In comments filed Monday before the Federal Communications Commission on its plan to unveil a national broadband strategy, old foes got a fresh chance to spar in long-standing battles over Special Access rates, Universal Service reform, and deployment versus adoption rates as a metric for success.
For Sprint Nextel Corp., competition is "the key to ensuring and expanding widespread, affordable broadband access.” But true facilities-based competition is being undermined by incumbent local exchange carriers -- the owners of the fiber pipes that hook wireless phones back into the telephone network at the tower, Sprint said. ILEC's "dominate the special access markets" to the detriment of the industry, the company warned -- leading to “lost productivity, lost income, and lost jobs.”
Verizon Communications, often a main target of Sprint Nextel's ire, called for the FCC to encourage “consumer empowerment" by allowing free choice of services, applications and devices on a "robust...secure broadband network." The FCC's plan should be "pro-innovation. pro-growth," Verizon said.
Investment in wireless is the key to a superior strategy, says T-Mobile, the nation's fourth-largest mobile phone carrier. Wireless deployment costs are "frequently less significant than comparable wired broadband deployments," the company wrote,...
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Monday, June 8th, 2009
From BroadbandCensus.com Weekly Report
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2009 – Late Friday afternoon, the Federal Communications Commission announced that Blair Levin, former chief of staff to Clinton FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, will be rejoining the commission “to help coordinate its development of a national broadband plan.”
This is a significant development for a number of reasons. Levin, the respected managing director of the investment advisory firm Stifel Nicolaus, was widely seen as a potential FCC chairman himself. He served on President Obama’s transition team. When the nod instead went to Obama’s Harvard Law School classman Julius Genachowski, the conventional wisdom had it that no other job at the commission could attract Levin’s interest.
As in a previous era – when Hundt was FCC chairman during the first term of the Clinton administration – Levin’s willingness to serve again at the FCC appears to herald an era of close and collegial cooperation among the executive branch agencies responsible for communications policy, and with the FCC. Genachowski served on the same team that Levin headed up at that time.
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Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 2, 2009 - Just 133 days into the Obama administration, technology policy and broadband deployment are issues "at the heart of this administration's plans for the future," Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Susan Crawford said Tuesday during opening remarks at the Computers, Freedom, Privacy conference in Washington.
Broadband deployment remains a linchpin of the Obama agenda, particularly for the nation's short and long term economic health. The nation's broadband connections are "slow and expensive" compared to the rest of the world, Crawford said.
"We are not falling behind," she warned. "We are definitely behind."
High speed networks can bridge economic, racial and cultural divides, Crawford said. Even the homeless now need access to the internet, Crawford said, referencing a recent article in The New York Times.
"We're talking about...the human need to connect," she said.
More importantly, broadband will be key to the nation's economic recovery and future stability. "The president cares deeply about [broadband]," she said. "Without adequate high speed connections, we will miss opportunities."
The Federal Communications Commission's forthcoming national broadband strategy will be a key tool to help aid the recovery effort, even after the stimulus programs have ended, Crawford...
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Monday, June 1st, 2009
From BroadbandCensus.com Weekly Report
WASHINGTON, June 1, 2009 – Reading through the Federal Communications Commission’s 90-page report, “Bringing Broadband to Rural America,” it is clear that questions of broadband data loom large over the pending national broadband strategy.
The report, which Acting Chairman Michael Copps issued under his own name, came in response to the 2008 farm bill, passed May 22, 2008. As with the Broadband Data Improvement Act, which passed Congress in October, both measures point to the recognition that broadband – as a significant national priority – warrants a significant national policy.
Writes Copps: “Our efforts to bring robust and affordable broadband to rural America begin with a simple question: what is the current state of broadband in rural America? We would like to answer this question definitively, and detail where broadband facilities are deployed, their speeds, and the number of broadband subscribers throughout rural America. Regrettably, we cannot. The Commission and other federal agencies simply have not collected the comprehensive and reliable data needed to answer this question.”
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