F.C.C. Gets Serious About Broadband

Though it may certainly seem that way, healthcare reform is not the only game in Washington, D.C. this week.  While that certainly is big news, and I will be writing a good amount on it this week, there are other things going on.  For one, today the Federal Communications Commission presented its plan for the future of broadband internet, wireless spectrum assignments, and so on.  All of this sounds very prosaic; after all, why would anyone except a network executive at a corporation such as AT&T or Verizon care about how much of the wireless spectrum is used by a given company?  However, there are some interesting parts of the newly-released proposal.  Chief among them, there is a major plan in the works that if the F.C.C. gets its way, internet speeds around the country will be approximately 25 times what they are today by 2020.

According to CNN, while the U.S. did develop the internet, we are now the subject of much ridicule for our slow internet speeds.  The article states that the U.S. is 18th worldwide for connection speeds with an average of 3.9 megabits/second, compared with 14.6 in South Korea.  Of course, most people don’t even know what their speed is, which is part of the problem.  After all, the fact that speed-wise our internet fails on its own will not magically get us faster internet; we must pressure the Internet Service Providers to increase the speed.  Further, part of the plan is to increase access to high-speed internet to 90% of Americans, some of whom live in areas where there are no incentives currently for the companies to go.  As FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says in the CNN article: “This is not something that is nice for us to do, it is everyone’s right.”