On April 17, 2008, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public en banc hearing on broadband network management practices. Hosted by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, the event was attended by five FCC Commissioners who heard from legal scholars, high-tech entrepreneurs, Web start-ups and an auditorium full of interested community members about whether and how the FCC should provide more oversight of phone and cable companies in order to ensure "net neutrality."

Stanford Law School Archivist Sarah Wilson has compiled a document with testimony, statements, press releases and news coverage related to the hearing. Her work, The FCC Hearing at Stanford, is available as part of the Robert Crown Law Library Legal Research Paper Series.

-Kate Wilko

We have recently seen reports on the sorry state of broadband network access in the United States (New Broadband Report and Two More Stories About Broadband). Now, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has released an official view of the state of broadband in the U.S in which it emphasizes the fact that things aren't as bad as they used to be and calls that progress. It says that "America’s consumers are now reaping the rewards of the Administration’s pro-investment, deregulatory policies..."

• Networked Nation: Broadband In America 2007, National Telecommunications And Information Administration, United States Department of Commerce, January 2008

The report says that "broadband availability and subscribership have increased dramatically" but ignores the fact that the U.S. has fallen from fourth to 15th in the world in broadband penetration. This is pure politics, it ignores reality, and does nothing to help us move forward.

The report says, "...the Administration has implemented a comprehensive and integrated package of technology, regulatory, and fiscal policies designed to lower barriers and create an environment in which broadband innovation and competition can flourish. The results have been striking." "Strikingly bad" is how most of the recent independent reports would describe the results.

• We have a broadband strategy? Bush administration says "yes" in cheerleading report, By Nate Anderson, ars technica, January 31, 2008
• Ignoring Reality, Bush Declares Broadband Mission Accomplished, press release, Free Press, January 31, 2008

More here.

This seems to be a week of stories about the need for better broadband access in the United States. Yesterday, we noted the new report from the state of California. Today, we find a story in The Economist and a new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

• Open up those highways, From The Economist print edition, Jan 17th 2008.
• Municipal Broadband: Demystifying Wireless and Fiber-Optic Options, by Christopher Mitchell. (See also: press release.)

From The Economist:

What accounts for the differences among rich countries? Two or three years ago demography was often cited: small, densely populated countries were easier to wire up than big, sparsely inhabited ones. But the leaders in broadband usage include Canada, where a tiny population is spread over a vast area. The best explanation, in fact, is that broadband thrives on a mix of competition and active regulation, to ensure an open contest.

From the ILSR press release:

The United States, creator of the Internet, increasingly lags in high-speed access to it. In the absence of a national broadband strategy, hundreds of communities have invested in broadband infrastructure to solve their problem locally. A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) explores this essential infrastructure and the options now available to communities.

The ILSR Report contends that DSL and cable networks fail to offer the speeds and capacity necessary for the digital future.

"As broadband has gone from convenience to necessity, communities can no longer rely on private providers to satisfy their broadband needs," explains Christopher Mitchell, author of the study and Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative for ILSR.

A new report on broadband access in California highlights some of the problems of broadband that are often glossed over in other reports.

The report is available in several files including maps and a spreadsheet here: The State of Connectivity: Building Innovation Through Broadband.

The report says that, while 96% of California residences "have access" to broadband of some kind, only half of Californians have access to broadband at speeds greater than 10 Mbps. And though access is available, barely more than half of Californians have adopted broadband at home. Further, "broadband infrastructure is deployed unevenly throughout the state, from state-of–the-art to nonexistent." And 1.4 million mostly rural Californians lack broadband access altogether.

Since by some measures, according to the report, "California remains a domestic leader in broadband adoption", this is not an inspiring situation.

I found the spreadsheet, "Appendix: Broadband Pricing Survey" particularly interesting. It compares more than 100 broadband services throughout the state and shows the price for download speed varies from $3.81 to $144, per megabyte.

Press coverage: California Broadband Task Force Releases Final Report, By Gina M. Scott, Government Technology, Jan 18, 2008.

Things are changing. The old ways of thinking about "government information" are becoming obsolete at Internet Speed. Check out this:

• Dick Durbin embraces community to help draft broadband legislation. David All, July 31, 2007.
  "I'm a Republican, so I must say I was somewhat shocked when I heard that
  Democratic Senator Dick Durbin was going to be posting at the popular
  conservative outpost, Redstate, about how best to write legislation for a
  national broadband strategy. But he has....[I]sn't it great that citizens now have the same access to the process as the lobbyists?"
• Legislation 2.0: A conversation with RedState. Dick Durbin, July 31, 2007.YouTube
  "I think this is a unique experiment in transparent government and an
  opportunity to demonstrate the democratic power of the internet. If we¹re
  successful, it could become a model for the way legislation on health care,
  tax policy or education is drafted in the future."
• What should we include in our national broadband strategy?, Dick Durbin, Redstate.

The OECD released its semi-annual broadband penetration rankings (Broadband Statistics to December 2006), which show that the United States has fallen further to 15th among the 30 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

There has been some criticism of the report and attempts have been made to discredit it. (See for example today's Wall Street Journal Broadband Baloney by Robert M. McDowell. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). Jul 24, 2007. pg. A.15; [WSJ subscription required]. Another copy here [Proquest subscription required]).

A report by freepress directly addresses the criticisms of the OECD report.

• 'Shooting the Messenger' Myth vs. Reality: U.S. Broadband Policy and International Broadband Rankings by S. Derek Turner, Research Director, Free Press, July 2007

Excerpt:

Release of the latest OECD report – unlike previous studies -- was met with a fierce response by incumbent providers and the think tanks they support, as well as prominent public attacks by several members of the executive branch.

Free Press found that the major critiques leveled at the OECD data simply fall apart upon closer examination. The coordinated attempt to “shoot the messenger” cannot hide critical failures in the U.S. broadband market. These failures are chiefly due to poor policy decisions that have fostered an anti-competitive marketplace. Our European and Asian counterparts are outperforming us because they have policies that foster vigorous competition in the broadband marketplace, offering consumers more choice, faster speeds and lower prices.

...In 2004, President Bush set a clear goal for high-speed Internet access in the United States...

The president clearly called for not only universal access by 2007, but more importantly he wanted broadband to be affordable. The president correctly pointed out that marketplace competition and consumer choice would spawn greater consumer broadband adoption, ultimately benefiting the entire American economy. This was his policy goal.

In reality, the United States has not met either the goal of universal availability or achieved the level of competition necessary to spur adoption rates and achieve the economic and social benefits the president desired.

But that hasn't stopped administration officials from declaring victory anyway.

As GPO pushes forward with it's Digital Future System and as the well connected (Internet-wise) Congress moves away from print and towards an exclusively online government information world, they might want to consider this new report published by the Communications Workers of America:

Speed Matters: A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States
http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/sm_report.pdf

According to this report:

The median download speed for the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). In Japan, the median download speed is 61 mbps, or 30 times faster than the U.S. The U.S. also trails South Korea at 45 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, Sweden at 18 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps. The median upload speed from the Speedmatters.org test was just 371 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or too transmit large files such as medical records.

Most people who went to Speedmatters.org to take the speed test used either a DSL connection or cable modem. Very few people with dial-up took the test because it took too long. According to surveys, somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of Americans still connect to the Internet with a dial-up connection. So the median speeds in this report are actually higher than if dial-up Internet users had chosen to participate in the survey. In other words, even these dismal statistics paint a rosier picture than the reality.

The report was compiled by people visiting a speed test site and providing their zip codes, so it isn't truly a random sample. Still makes for interesting reading for broadband advocates.

And it should make interesting reading for policymakers who desire to eliminate print. And for people interested in constructing a geographically distributed system of electronic federal publications which could be more easily accessed over urban networks than all users dragging every publication from Washington.

As citizens increasingly need access to broadband and wireless Internet connections to fully participate in democracy, it become increasingly important for government information specialists to be aware of changes in local policies and initiatives in this area. Two sites that help are the Municipal broadband map from News.com and the MuniWireless site.

Municipal broadband nationwide. News.com. "Government-sponsored projects to provide fiber-optic or wireless networks are taking off across the United States, as are efforts to legislate the issue in state capitols."

Notice that the above site says "Last updated: April 25, 2005." I don't know if they are keeping this up to date or not, but another site, MuniWireless, tracks similar information and seems to be updating its information daily. See, the Initiatives page for some of the same information tracked on the News.com map. MuniWireless describes itself this way:

"This site is devoted to municipal broadband projects worldwide that are funded or supported by cities and towns, especially those projects that incorporate wireless technologies. These range from downtown hot-zones & city- and county-wide wireless broadband networks, to country-wide deployments. Although we often use the word “city," rural municipalities receive equal coverage, because they are leading the fight for affordable, fast, universal access to the Internet. We also cover the products, technologies, and standards that comprise public broadband networks, and the organizations that design, install, and maintain them.

A 2005 report by the FCC on broadband network access is back in the news this week.

• Federal Communications Commission Releases Data On High-Speed Services For Internet Access, FCC, July 7, 2005

An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal quotes it ( Broadband Breakout [subscription required], also available from ProQuest [subscription required] Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition) New York, N.Y.: Feb 16, 2007. pg. A.14). It uses the (evidently inflated -- see article below) figures in the report as a reason for opposing network neutrality and regulation.

An article in Information Week examines it critically (When It Comes To Broadband, U.S. Plays Follow The Leader By Richard Hoffman, InformationWeek, Feb. 15, 2007). Hoffman is thorough and objective and his piece could be called a "State of the Broadband Nation." Hoffman describes the state of broadband access in the U.S., compares it to other nations, and puts current debates of telecommunications regulation in this context. I recommend it as essential reading for anyone interested in access to networked government information.