So Everyone's Clueless?

So how do you build a national plan for broadband?

It seems no one is offering many specifics.

This piece from John Eggerton from Multichannel news is pretty alarming:

The Federal Communications Commission's broadband czar is not impressed with the agency's submissions from the public and industry on the grand broadband plan, suggesting there is too much pie in the sky and not enough pie chart on the page.

How anemic are the offerings?

He ended his talk by literally begging for better input. "We really need your best ideas. And we need them quickly and clearly."

So Google's effort crowdsourcing the National Broadband Plan hardly inspires confidence, nor does it bespeak any national consensus. Now the FCC's Broadband Czar is begging for better public input, too.

Suppose this plea puts us all on the spot...

Crowdsourcing and the Broadband Map

Drew Clark of BroadbandCensus.com has a great idea:

One of the things that BroadbandCensus.com has been doing since our launch, in January 2008, is to provide a crowdsourced, public and transparent collection of data about local broadband Speeds, Prices, Availability, Reliability and Competition. We call this the Broadband ‘SPARC.’

The basic idea is to get as much information from as many sources as possible to create sort of a collage, a national broadband map extrapolated from an enormous set of data points, ideally from lots and lots of individuals. There's a lot to be said for such a bottom-up approach, setting aside the initial challenge of getting folks to participate. The main challenge is that the starting point is a blank slate.

The question, really, is when and how such a crowdsourced resource should inform planning and decision making.

Clark has been outspoken in his criticism of Connected Nation's approach to broadband mapping, offering crowdsourcing as an alternative.

Yet, it seems there's less light between Connected Nation's approach and BroadbandCensus.com's. Indeed, Connected Nation has placed public verification of their mapping results at the forefront. Though they've not referred to the effort as crowdsourcing, I suppose they could.

Connected Nation brokers arrangements with multiple providers offering to protect what those providers believe is proprietary data. In other words, Connected Nation works with providers, accepting the data that they are given. The basic map begins, then, as the map that providers would have us see.

There are multiple reasons to be skeptical of this base map as an outcome. But it is only the first step.

Some providers dramatically overstate their coverage, though it's not always who you might think. Many suspect that Verizon and Comcast claim availability where it is not to make it appear that the broadband challenge is smaller than it may appear. But, according to my conversations with Connected Nation's mapping team, many small providers claim universal access in their service areas. Anyone who claims to be lacking service can get it simply by asking. Whether the data come from large or small providers, there's no way to challenge the assertions providers make other than through address by address verification.

So without attributing motives, we can stipulate one simple fact: for numerous reasons (reticence of providers to cough up accurate data as well as evolutionary nature of their networks) no national broadband map can be accurate.

And given these manifold flaws, the best verifier of any map is the public itself. Hence the importance of some sort of crowdsourcing effort as a corrective to any national map (whether prepared by Connected Nation, some other private sector entity, the providers themselves, or the FCC). In fact, Connected Nation realizes the importance of verification and has, as it happens, probably gotten more inputs from its own rather quiet crowdsourcing efforts than BroadbandCensus.com.

A Google Opinions on Broadband

So Google is encouraging folks to "Submit your ideas for a National Broadband Plan". At the time of this writing,

1,719 people have submitted 440 ideas and cast 35,988 votes...

As one might imagine, there's a lot of chaff, but there are some solid ideas. It's worth taking a look if only to get a sense of the breadth of opinion (and misinformation).

A few examples:

"Investigate ways to increase the span of wireless networks and make it more advantageous for local governments to provide free wireless internet."
swankestZACK, Louisville, KY

So these are probably both good goals. Longer range wireless networks. Free wifi. Awesome. But the vision isn't matched with tactics. Make it advantageous? Uh, great, but how?

"Make Broadband a Utility. Internet is like phone service, water service, or electricity. It is quickly becoming almost necessary to have it. Since Internet itself is a service, it should become a Utility with no filtering."
Navarr, Spring, TX

So the key for the National Broadband Strategy should be definitional? (I.e., redefining Internet as utility?) What difference would this make at a practical level?

I could go on. But suffice it to say there are a lot of well-intended ideas. But how these would (or will) fit together as a coherent strategy remains to be seen. My hat's off to Google for providing the space to try.

And there are a slightly more articulated visions:

"Encourage investment from diverse companies in broadband infrastructure and support innovative public-private collaborations to reach remote, unserved parts of our nation, so everyone is connected to an increasingly robust Internet."
NextGenWeb, Washington, DC

Okay, sure, so you'd expect NextGenWeb to have a reasonably lucid vision. Of course, like the other ideas, this is a vision, not an implementation plan.

Still this might be an interesting forum. It'll be interesting to see how many ideas and voices will be raised at the Google site.

Henchmen?

So don't know if you've seen it, but techdirt has an illuminating piece by Paul Masnick, who is largely sympathetic with Art Brodsky's (valedictory?!) rant aginst Connected Nation.

Masnick first makes this overwrought claim about Connected Nation:

First, it's just a "mapping" organization and it's run by the telcos themselves, allowing them to continue to fudge the data to make markets look a lot more competitive than they really are. And, yet, thanks to all the political love that goes out to Connected Nation, it looks like they're about to get hundreds of millions of dollars in broadband stimulus money.

Of course, it's disappointing that Connected Nation continues to be seen by its critics as merely a front for the telcos. But the larger disappointment is, without belaboring the point, this characterization of Connected Nation's work completely fails to acknowledge that Connected Nation believes mapping to be only the first step in improving broadband. In states like Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky the map has only been stage one run in tandem with statewide, county-by-county planning efforts that foster local empowerment and decision-making focused both on improving demand and channeling that demand toward feasible, meaningful, local improvements in supply.

After swallowing the bromide against Connected Nation hook, line, and sinker without critically engaging the organization's actual work or its results, Masnick then ends with this little bit of confusion:

I certainly agree that better data is important, but I have to admit I'm still somewhat confused as to what real problem we end up solving with mapping alone? Yes, it will give us more data to figure out just what the current situation is when it comes to broadband deployment, but that's got little to do with actually improving our broadband infrastructure.

Ahem, welcome to the party.

And if you'd look beyond your suspicion and prejudicial rage against Connected Nation, then you'd seen the organization's actual focus lies beyond the maps, too. The map is merely the first step in improving conditions on the ground. And those conditions will be vastly improved by enlisting the support and efforts of local leaders and residents and leveraging any and all willing assets, broadband platforms, and potential solutions. Not by throwing out the baby with the bathwater as Connected Nation's critics so often seem willing to do.

How Fast?

So the de facto standard for broadband seems to be 3 megabytes per second. The broadband stimulus will favor proposals (at least for now) coming from areas in which more than 50% of residents have under 3Mb/s.

Many folks argue that in order to be competitive with better-wired nations, we need to set a higher national standard. Say, 20 Mb/s everywhere. Or 50. Or more. By this logic, the broadband stimulus needs to support improvements in bandwidth universally, not just showing a preference for un- and underserved areas.

I won't quibble with that argument. I think it's largely true that for too many years our federal policy failed to push speed. Just think, the FCC definition of broadband for most of Martin's tenure was 200 KILObytes/second! Pretty easy benchmark to meet.

I agree that much should be done to promote higher speeds ubiquitously. But for now, we have literally, borrowing from Matelart, a broadband archipelago: islands of pervasive, high-speed access and large oceans of nuthin'. This differentiation threatens to create (or entrench) a technological underclass that is not healthy for the nation as a whole. So stimulating broadband improvements in underserved areas is essential.

The question for those presently in the ocean, then, is what a tolerable level of service is. For some, the stimulus may mean that the capital exists to build a fiber network. For many (if not most) underserved areas, though, the stimulus will be sufficient for fixed wireless, which tends not to allow bandwidths as high as fiber.

So do we hold all communities, rural and urban, to the same standard? I think a national goal of 100 Mb/s is laudable (hell, I support it myself). But I'm enough of a pragmatist to realize that this standard is out of reach without a much larger federal investment than $7.2 billion.

As such, I contend that the excellent should not get in the way of the good. A national goal (say, 100 Mb/s) should not interfere with local build-out at some lower level. When local actors deliberate over their present needs, their perception of future requirements, and the extant logjams to creating service, the outcome is generally a realistic depiction of what standard should obtain for that locale. This is the strength of statewide planning efforts in places like Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, California and elsewhere: coalitions of local residents and leaders have considered (and continue to consider) what solutions are possible for them. Right now. This pragmatic approach should supercede any national standard (which is essentially arbitrary anyway) because it based on a finer-grained depiction of local conditions.

In short, speed standards should be pushed by federal policy. But in the near term definitions of broadband should be an emergent property of a nationally-promoted, locally-conducted grassroots planning process.

Muni Broadband In The Cold?

According to Ed Gubbins the rules for obtaining funding through the Stimulus Package (the name pales in rhetorical comparison with "New Deal", doesn't it?) are leaving municipalities with little hope. Specifically, the NTIA's definition of "underservice" keep most areas of any size out of the running for broadband dollars in the near term.

One group of broadband stimulus hopefuls that has been in large part swept out of the running by the specifics of the plan is individual municipalities of any size. Though the stimulus plan stoked broad interest from municipalities earlier this year, many of them have been frustrated by the program’s preference for “underserved areas,” which the government has defined as areas where where at least half of all households lack broadband, where fewer than 40% of households subscribe to broadband, or where no service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least 3 Mb/s.

Those rules sent the city of Northfield, Minnesota, for example, which had hoped to secure stimulus funds, back to the drawing board in its efforts to finance its plans. Melissa Reeder, Northfield’s information technology director, told the local press, “Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single Minnesota city that would qualify.”

I've written before in this space that the urban-rural divide doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. I'll acknowledge that the "unserved/underserved/served" trichotomy may create as many perversions. The bottom line is that any one-size-fits-all federal definition or standard of service or need is likely to have a similar effect. This reality brings us back to the importance of local engagement and planning for broadband. If standards of service are the product of sober thinking coming from local actors, then local conditions and logics of feasibility can dictate what the ideal level of service is.