Irving: Broadband policy plan won’t impact stimulus spending

The FCC's decision Wednesday to create a national broadband policy won't have much impact on the broadband stimulus spending, especially the billions required to be given out by October of this year, according to Larry Irving, the former head of the NTIA and now co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance.

"There are two different things going on here, that are all of a piece," Irving said in an interview this morning. "The stimulus is a timely, targeted and temporary effort to stimulate the American economy, and this administration has always realized that broadband is a part of that."

At the same time, every agency of the federal government is exploring ways to "use technology to make the lives of the American people better, and part of that is the national broadband policy," Irving said. "The FCC has a big job ahead of it."

The FCC's target for the national policy is February 2010, Irving said, so it's unlikely that anything the FCC does would impact the first two tranches of broadband stimulus spending, which will go out by October 2009. "The FCC's work might inform the third tranche, but the NTIA's work is more likely to inform that," Irving said. "The FCC has a huge process to undertake."

"You can think of these efforts as two trains heading in the same direction but on different tracks – at some point they may come together," Irving said. "The stimulus is the local track, making a couple of stops. The national broadband policy is more like the express train, covering a longer distance."

The NTIA is closing in on key definitions for the broadband stimulus spending, such as deciding what is broadband, what is unserved and what is underserved, Irving said.

What the stimulus can do is bring technology quickly to unserved and underserved areas so that segments of the population that don't have access to broadband can get it and, in the process, improve their job prospects, Irving said. "We expect to see some answers in the next few weeks."

Some service providers have expressed concern that they are expected to have projects that are "shovel-ready," and yet the broadband stimulus money is not to be used on projects already in the works.

"The key thing there is substitution – we don't want states to solve their fiscal problems by using federal money on things they were already planning and had funded," Irving said. If a planned project wasn't funded already, it could qualify for broadband stimulus money, he said.