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ancianita

(35,813 posts)
Tue Dec 21, 2021, 01:26 PM Dec 2021

Congress people! Knock off your fear of offending your broadband donors--get your people broadband!

Terry often writes about how the plan failed to deliver pretty much everything it promised, and very few folks in telecom policy circles seem particularly bothered by that fact.

U.S. telecom policymakers just keep trudging forward, as if we hadn't already promised to fix this problem several times over, despite the fact none of the 2010 plan's primary goals were actually met:

Goal No. 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second. (Nope)

Goal No. 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation. (not even close).

Goal No. 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose. (the pandemic brutally showcased how this absolutely isn't true. In fact, Techdirt ran an entire conference on the subject)

Goal No. 4: Every American community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings. (again, COVID showed how far we actually were from this goal)

Goal No. 5: To ensure the safety of the American people, every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network. (We did finally start building FirstNet, though it's incomplete and been plagued by delays. Also, remember when Verizon Wireless throttled those California firefighters as they were battling record wildfires and tried to upsell them to more expensive plans?)

Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption. (never happened at any consistent scale).

We're now poised to spend another $42 billion on broadband despite not having accurately fixed our inaccurate broadband maps. The FCC also just announced another $1 billion investment into rural broadband, without acknowledging this was a problem that was supposed to be fixed years ago...if the 10 year plan in the Broadband Plan had worked as designed, none of this spending would have been necessary, as these shortcomings would have been resolved...

The failure of the National Broadband Plan is more than a digital divide issue, the plan included provisions for a consumer centric digital privacy mechanism that were discarded with the rest of the plan.


To be clear, our new $42 billion broadband plan absolutely will be helpful in driving needed broadband funds to a lot of areas. But it's fairly clear it was crafted without truly reckoning with the failures of past policies. And it once again doesn't target the real cause of spotty, shitty U.S. broadband: monopolization and corruption. The latter (corruption) is a Sisyphean task to be sure. But tackling U.S. competition shouldn't be this hard. Hundreds of towns, cities, co-ops, and utilities are doing it every day, though lending them a hand was one of the first lobbying casualties in the broadband infrastructure bill (again, corruption).

If U.S. policymakers really want to fix U.S. broadband, it starts with clearly acknowledging and calling out regional monopolization (something neither party has much interest in doing for fear of upsetting politically powerful campaign contributors tethered to our intelligence gathering). It involves shaking off lobbying influence, and ending the 30 year tendency of letting monopolistic giants like AT&T and Comcast literally write state and federal telecom policy. And it most certainly involves actually acknowledging the failures of the past so we don't doom ourselves to repeating them in perpetuity.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211220/08174048155/as-us-prepares-big-new-broadband-plan-few-notice-our-last-major-broadband-plan-was-major-dud.shtml?fbclid=IwAR0cHwqBG3l6Uc71R9_clFp4GwMXth_KVym0r7LqGWfNW5Zv9JvWpCSptjo

Not soon enough! We're too smart to be so bought by telecom lobbyists.


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