Broadband Obama

It's hard for us to imagine today any home in the U.S. without electricity, no matter how far-flung or rural. In the 1930s it wasn't too hard to imagine. Only 10% of rural homes had electricity, but after the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration in 1936, that number shot up to 90% by the end of the decade. I wonder if a decade from now we'll have difficulty imagining a home without broadband.

We have a new administration and a new Congress, and both appear to be making broadband a priority. What's more, they seem to be viewing broadband much the way President Franklin D. Roosevelt viewed electricity. In a time of deep economic recession, stimulating the economy can be linked directly to bold public policy initiatives. I would hesitate to call the current stimulus plan wending its way through Congress the new New Deal, but Barack Obama and lawmakers have the opportunity to simultaneously tackle the digital divide and economic recovery. If there is any time to tackle the broadband discrepancy between urban and rural and rich and poor, now is probably the time to do it.

The new administration is signaling it doesn't just want to address the 10% to 15% of homes that have no access to broadband, it wants to raise the quality of broadband available to all Americans. Money will be made available not only to connect the unconnected, but to increase the speeds available to the average consumer over wired and wireless broadband connections. A number of proposals are floating about on how to accomplish this: direct grants made to rural operators and co-ops, an allocation of a portion of the Universal Service Fund or, in the case of boosting broadband speeds, no-interest loans.

Carriers big and small stand to benefit from these programs, giving them the capital and incentive to build faster, more far-reaching networks, as would their vendors, which would need to develop faster and further-reaching technologies. But government money tends to come with more government regulation. Requirements such as open access on wireless networks, network neutrality on wireline networks, price caps, no data caps, and discounted or free service plans might make incumbent operators less interested. As we saw during the last administration, though, there are nontraditional operators willing to go where the telcos won't — it just became a question of whether the government was willing to accommodate them. Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC, developed that willingness toward the end of his tenure, tailoring the last 700 MHz auction for open access and pushing the idea of a free nationwide broadband wireless network.

Martin wasn't exactly the darling of Congress or the telcos, but Julius Genachowski, Obama's FCC chair nominee, is likely to follow the spirit of some of Martin's policies. Just as Google whispered into Martin's ear, Genachowski has a lot of ties to Silicon Valley and is likely to give its views on broadband as much weight as he does the telcos he regulates. That doesn't mean that carriers won't have a say in Obama's broadband revolution. In fact, many of the policies the government is debating put the traditional operators, cable companies and wireless incumbents front and center. But if they don't deliver the speed and availability this administration desires, I doubt it will have qualms about looking elsewhere.