|
 |
FCC Needs More Broadband Time
by Paul McGoldrick
The attention devoted to the health care bill has allowed a number of other congressional news items to slip out of view. One of them is the delayed report (National Broadband Report) from the FCC. Congress gave the money for the report in the financial stimulus package in early 2009, and the FCC has been focused on it since April 2009.
Congress tasked them with developing a plan where every home in the US could obtain broadband service at a reasonable price – highly laudable and matching one of Obama’s campaign promises. The resulting task force has been led by Blair Levin, a former chief of staff for a previous FCC commissioner. The report, by statute, is due on February 17, 2010. Levin reported in November that it would be ready on time, but now the chairman of the commission has written to members of Congress requesting an additional four weeks, “to get additional input from stakeholders.”
The actual facts are that there are two major stumbling blocks anticipated in the report. The first is that the commission will be suggesting that the USF (the Universal Service Fund), that little extra on your monthly phone bill, be redirected from aiding lower income phone service provision to helping rural Internet connections. The second is that the commission wants a whole bunch of TV-evacuated UHF RF space reallocated to ISPs.
The USF is sitting with about seven billion dollars in its account at the moment, so there is money to help out (but at the cost of the nation’s poor), but the idea of reallocating RF channels – without payment – is extraordinarily inappropriate in a climate when RF space is so valuable.
And why is the administration even allowing the FCC to get involved in this? The commission has had no teeth for decades and always backs down when faced with legal action by the people that they are trying to go along with their recommendations. Remember the stereo AM debacle in the early 1980s? Motorola, out of four competing transmission systems, may have won that battle, but all the vendors lost the war. I was at Harris at the time, and, believe me, it was nasty, really nasty...but the commission just sat back, unable to make a pronouncement that they knew would be disputed by three other vendors.
If the FCC recommends something that doesn’t suit local providers it will not happen, unless they put an available pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. This is, after all, a project conceived by leprechauns.
|
|
|
|
|
