Thursday, October 28, 2010

Blair Levin Shares Regrets of FCC National Broadband Plan

The past few weeks have been nothing less than embarrassing for the FCC and their National Broadband Plan. Grumblings had been heard all along that it might be heading in the wrong direction, but the numbers released by Ookla earlier this month showed that advertised speeds were far better than the FCC once thought. One of the authors, Blair Levin, bared some interesting insight in a tell-all interview with PC World today.

"Conventional wisdom says the primary metric for measuring the validity or power of a national broadband plan is the speed of the wireline network to the most rural of residents." Levin told reporter David Lamli. But he continued: "That way of looking at the problem is entirely wrong, is profoundly wrong -- almost every word in the sentence I just uttered is wrong."

Levin explained that using this metric points us in the wrong direction and leads to wrong conclusions. "it's almost always about wireline and it turns out wireless is going to be the key driver of growth in the next decade." The FCC's apparently one-sided focus on improving wireline speeds turned out to be costly, not feasibly, but worst of all, not the real problem in the first place. Levin explained, "I would say that 4G is going to end up being more important to more people over the next couple of years than increases in wireline speed."

It's ironic, really, considering we dug up reports from the FCC months ago that explicitly recognized wireless broadband as the most cost-effective solution for rural broadband. Nonetheless, Levin laments that the National Broadband Plan apparently overlooked this fact, or perhaps, discovered it too late.

But Levin later made a striking comment about the wireless/wireline argument. "It's a mistake to think of wireless communications as separate to wired communications. Most wireless communications are riding over wire, so one has to have both networks working well." The goal of our broadband infrastructure should be to improve speed and accessibility, neither of which isolate any particular means as the sole solution. Even though wireless is the most cost-effective to reach rural subscribers, the wireline network must be robust enough to support those users.

In the end, the network as a whole has been proven to be two things: first, not at all as bad as we thought it once was; but second, still an important endeavor for our government and industries to continue improving. Levin leaves us with a telling comment to keep in mind, "The most important thing to understand is that broadband is not important in and of itself. It is important because it is the vehicle of knowledge exchange, which turns out to be an incredibly important driver of economic and job growth and critical for a civic society."

Labels: Blair Levin, FCC, Fixed Wireless Broadband, National Broadband Plan, Rural Broadband