What is broadband?

The debate about the need for a national broadband  policy has been pushed to the back burner by national security issues, but before it comes back to a boil the industry needs to agree on what broadband is.

There are those who say the roughly 1M bit/sec DSL and cable TV modem links are broadband, while others, such as Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett, scoff at that, saying broadband is up around 100M bit/sec.

Reality probably falls somewhere in between.

The Federal Communications Commission says broadband services are those that support bidirectional data transmissions of at least 200K bit/sec.

Barrett disagrees. "Three hundred or 400 kilobits is not real broadband," he said in a speech earlier this year. "When you get to five or 10 meg, that's real broadband, going to 100. The capabilities you can provide the user . . . [get] to be phenomenal."

Barrett is one of 300 high-tech executive members of the Technology Network, a group that lobbies the federal government on a variety of technology issues, including broadband. In January, the group called on the federal government to create a national policy that would bring 100M bit/sec to 100 million homes by 2010.

TechNet member Rick Roscitt, CEO of ADC Telecommunications, says a nationwide broadband network that's available to all users would accelerate delivery and acceptance of everything from real-time distance learning to medical imaging among doctors and hospitals, downloadable movies and online gaming.

Broadband should be national priority

"Broadband should be a national imperative for this country in the 21st century, just like putting a man on the moon was imperative in the last century," said TechNet member John Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco, in a statement earlier this year. "To stay competitive, educate the workforce and increase productivity, the United States must have ubiquitous broadband."

The group says it firmly believes that existing DSL and cable modem services are not "real broadband."

Delivering 100M bit/sec to every home is "a nice goal," says Pat Hurley, an analyst at TeleChoice. But the DSL and cable modem service providers can't even sell what they have today. Only 10% to 15% of the households that have access to high-speed Internet services have signed up for them, Hurley says. "There's a long way to go to convince people that existing services are what they need."

That will change as households buy additional computers and start to network them, Hurley says. "If you have a wireless access point . . . and the kids are surfing the Web and you need to go on the corporate VPN, you can't be sharing a dial-up connection."

But you don't need 100M bit/sec to satisfy those demands. "The FCC's definition of broadband, anything over 200K bit/sec, is very realistic," says Charles Hoffman, CEO of Covad Communications. "100M bit/sec to the home will never happen."

Other network executives agree. "The vast majority of people would have no idea what to do with [100M bit/sec]," says William Esrey, chairman and CEO at Sprint. "Maybe some day with full video, HDTV and all family members on at the same time, then maybe."