My fellow Americans

It was odd to hear President Bush call for universal broadband during a week when RBOCs were reporting substantial jumps in DSL subscribers all by themselves, thank you very much. It was odder still to hear the president call for universal broadband by 2007 during the same week that sources told Telephony the U.S. broadband market would effectively reach saturation that year.

Bush also emphasized access to rural areas (can't get DSL at the Crawford ranch, maybe?), and he stressed the need to make it easier for service providers to use federal land to lay fiber. But his comments were probably mainly meant to show support for Congressional efforts to ban broadband taxes. The same week, Senator Kerry, in less direct terms, called for investment in broadband.

It is said that people are the least honest before marriage, after the hunt and during elections. (There's a joke about Nortel's accounting in there somewhere, but I'm not touching it.) So it would be foolish to put much stock in stump-speech promises. And in fact, members of any high-tech industry usually say that the best thing the government can do for it is to stay out of its way. Easing fiber deployment and lifting broadband taxes are two helpful ways of doing that. But when the telecom industry (which, like the president, spends most of its time in either Washington, D.C. or Texas) needed assistance the most, the administration's lack of clarity and dexterity was one of this industry's biggest problems. A politician looking to gain points with the broadband industry might address that concern. But admittedly, it wouldn't make a very good stump speech.

E-mail me at egubbins@primediabusiness.com.