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What's 'broadband' in the policy debate?

By John Dix
Network World, 06/10/02

The need for a national broadband policy was one of the hot potatoes tossed around the recent Vortex conference in Southern California, the Network World invitation-only gathering that brought together industry thought-leaders to assess where the industry is and where it is going.

Intel CEO Craig Barrett said unequivocally yes, we need a broadband policy because it is in the best economic interest of the country. DSL and cable modems aren't broadband, Barrett said. They are incremental improvements over what we have now. What he and other tech leaders want the government to push for is 100M bit/sec Internet links to 100 million homes by the end of the decade.

Most other Vortex speakers, however, look at DSL and cable modem as broadband. Robert Pepper, chief of the FCC's Office of Plans and Policy, said 80% of U.S. households have access to broadband cable modem or DSL service today and that will rise to 90% by year-end.

In terms of acceptance, Pepper says broadband took only four years to penetrate 10% of all homes, making it one of the most rapidly accepted technologies ever, as fast as PCs and DVD players.

That led Paul Johnson, a technology analyst with The Equality Research Department of Robertson Stephens, to question the need for a national broadband policy. Broadband has one of the fastest consumer uptakes in history and yet it's broken? There is no need for a policy, he said, because competition is the best policy.

But broadband as we know it today isn't changing things dramatically. William Raduchel, CTO with AOL, pointed out that it doesn't save the average consumer any time. People log on, do some messaging and check some stocks. With broadband it takes 22 minutes vs. 25 minutes.

The broadband vision backed by Barrett and other tech CEOs is a different animal. Connecting households to the Internet at 100M bit/sec would lead to substantial change, particularly in the fields of entertainment and probably in other areas we have yet to envision.

Getting there may, in fact, require the government's help. These speeds are beyond the pale of current DSL and cable technologies. And consider what government development of highways meant to trucking and commerce and even recreation.

But we can't argue sensibly about the need for a national policy until we agree on what broadband is and how much bandwidth is required to achieve change. Let's start there.