The U.S. Congress must set goals for broadband rollout and speed, and increase financial incentives for broadband providers to expand and improve their networks, witnesses at a U.S. Senate hearing said Tuesday.

The U.S. trails behind several countries in both average broadband speed and broadband adoption, and the U.S. needs a national policy focused on increasing both those numbers, said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) labor union. The average download speed in the U.S. is 2.4 megabits per second, while the average in Japan is 63.6 megabits per second, according to a CWA survey released in August.

"This is not an accident that this happened in Japan," Cohen told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. "That was the focus of their public policy."

The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have an extensive broadband rollout policy, Cohen said.

Cohen and other witnesses didn't offer a lot of specific ideas for a national broadband policy, but a common suggestion was to refocus the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund more on broadband than on telephone service. The fund, with an annual budget of about US$7 billion, collects taxes on telecom service and uses about two-thirds of that money to subsidize telephone service to rural areas. "Dial tone doesn't need that kind of funding any more," Cohen said.

Several witnesses offered support for the Broadband Data Improvement Act, a bill that would take several steps to improve data collection about broadband services across the U.S. "We don't even map out in our country where we stand on broadband," Cohen said. "Step one is we need to know where we stand."

The full Senate hasn't voted on the act, which was introduced in May 2007.

Rey Ramsey, chairman and CEO of One Economy, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing technology to low-income people, called on Congress to set broadband goals for the U.S. that don't exist in policy today. The government needs to also focus on broadband applications, such as telemedicine and distance learning, that will drive broadband adoption and private investment, he said.

"We are falling behind," he said. "We're not doing enough in applications."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.