JK op-ed: Taking the Lead on Broadband

Taking the lead on broadband
Too few providers competing for consumers in Western Massachusetts results in weaker service and higher prices than necessary.
By John Kerry
Updated: 03/22/2010 09:50:45 AM EDT

Monday March 22, 2010

WASHINGTON

As a kid, we watched the news on a little black and white television and counted on a daily newspaper to deliver events around the world to our doorstep. Today millions of Americans have access to laptops, smart phones, and Wi- Fi broadband service that connect them to the Internet and to thousands of media outlets updated by the minute - even as they walk throughout their homes and streets. These advances are great, but they're incomplete. America invented the Internet, but we still haven't reached the goal of universal broadband service, and consumers here don't enjoy the prices or level of service common in many other advanced countries today. Experts debate where we rank in the world of broadband providers, but one fact is clear: we are nowhere near number one. And that is where the United States belongs. For a country as great as we are, in a global market growing more competitive by the minute, if you're not first, you're last. Falling behind means lost opportunities for job creation, innovation, and economic development in rural America and our cities. In Boston, the last time the data was collected in 2006, 80 percent of kids in our public schools did not have broadband Internet service at home and most of them still don't because their parents just can't afford it. In Western Massachusetts, towns like Monroe and Savoy have no broadband service and others, like West Stockbridge and Chesterfield have only one broadband provider.

Almost uniquely among OECD countries, America has adopted no policies to require the owners of broadband cables to open their infrastructure to rival sellers in order to enhance competition. America relies almost exclusively on “facilities competition”, the provision of rival infrastructures: a cable provider may compete, for example, with a network that runs optical fibre to the home. True, there is a legitimate worry that forcing a company to rent out parts of its infrastructure to competitors may deter investment, but a review of international broadband policies prepared for the FCC by Harvard’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society revealed a range of successful compromises in use in other countries. The FCC has availed itself of none of them, and suggests that wireless broadband could instead provide more competition. But wireless data transfer is very much slower and less reliable than fixed broadband; it is more a complement than a competitor.

If America’s facilities-based system were really working, the country would at the very least enjoy first-rate broadband in dense urban areas where providers are most likely to recoup their investments quickly. Yet in February the Saïd Business School at Oxford and the Universidad de Oviedo released a study, funded by Cisco, that produced a broadband quality score based on bit volume and speed, mapped against current and probable future applications. Chicago, America’s best-performing city, ranked 26th, below Sofia and Bucharest. No American city was judged “ready for tomorrow”. Among countries America ranked 16th, which is roughly where it falls on almost any available measure of broadband penetration or quality. That is not good enough.