National broadband policy must push adoption

The U.S. National Broadband Policy needs to solve the country’s adoption problem, not just its access problem, and do so without unnecessary regulation that would slow down private investment in broadband infrastructure, a crowded panel of industry insiders said Wednesday at Supercomm’s National Broadband Strategy Conference.

“We see towns with 100% coverage and they have a choice between two wireline broadband providers and three 3G providers, and 50% of them don’t choose broadband,” said Bob Udell, senior vice president of Telephone Operations, for independent telco, Consolidated Communications. “For some its economic reasons, for others, lifestyle reasons.”

The fact that 95% of Americans can get broadband but one-third of that number don’t choose to purchase it has broader implications for the U.S. economy and must be addressed, said Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs at AT&T.

“If you believe in broadband and the good it can do for this country, that’s something we have to tackle,” Cicconi said. The FCC’s broadband policy has to address the economic, social and educational issues that are undermining adoption, he said.

John Horrigan, the consumer research director for the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the FCC, said the agency is conducting a national survey to try to determine the reasons one-third of those who could get broadband don’t.

“We are going to try to find out if that has to do with price of monthly service or the cost of owning a computer or if they don’t understand what the Internet might be good for in their lives,” Horrigan said. “Also, we will look at initiatives that are out there already to see what the best practices are to close the adoption gap.”

Several speakers used the panel as another occasion to caution the FCC against Net Neutrality legislation that could discourage broadband investment.

Bruce Melman, co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance, a non-profit group that has argued against Net Neutrality rules, cited research that shows a 2% reduction in investment in the telecom sector would result in the loss of 31,000 jobs in the economy while a 10% drop would produce a 156,000 job loss.

Cicconi pointed out that AT&T did not apply for broadband stimulus funding because of what it considered the overly restrictive regulatory strings attached.

“They put regulatory strings on this money and requirements that are very akin to some of the Net Neutrality requirements being pushed currently,” he said. “We considered them overly constraining and that was absolutely a major factor in AT&T‘s decision not to apply. If we are not going to take government money for free with those kinds of strings attached, why would we invest our own under those same circumstances?”