FCC Policies Encourage Investment, Genachowski Says; Wireless Capacity Constraints Underlined
The FCC’s broadband policy continues to actively encourage investment in broadband and innovation, said Chairman Julius Genachowski at the Future of the City forum late Wednesday. Staffs at the FCC are running a consultation process with many broadband stakeholders on an ongoing basis, he said in an interview after his speech. The Comcast decision is something that everyone’s interested in so it’s important to consult with stakeholders, he said, regarding FCC’s closed-door meetings on broadband rules (CD June 23 p1).
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The FCC’s broadband policy continues to actively encourage investment in broadband innovation, Genachowski said in his speech. It’s essential that “our policies promote massive private investment in wired and wireless broadband,” he said. The National Broadband Plan is at the center of the FCC’s agenda, he said, saying the plan sets “ambitious yet achievable goals” for broadband deployment and adoption. Recent OECD reports suggested that the U.S. is lagging behind other countries in broadband and innovation, he said. The cost of digital exclusion also continues to grow, he said. Meanwhile, spectrum congestion is primarily an urban issue, he said.
"We are not a big fan of the third way approach,” said Robert Quinn, AT&T senior vice president, at a broadband policy panel at the forum. Applying common carriage regulation to the entirety of Internet network architecture is not the right solution to solve a very narrow problem, he said. A lot is yet to be defined, said Sascha Meinrath, a director at the New America Foundation. “We are still in the process of collecting feedback,” he said.
Panelists underlined the capacity challenge for wireless development. It’s because of an “inherent physics problem” that cell towers have only so much capacity, said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. Building more cell towers is one solution, but “we have city after city after city who decides they don’t like cell towers,” he said. Quinn saw reducing last mile constraints as critical. The “corporate mantra” is to get the wireless data traffic off the wireless last mile and onto the core network as quickly as possible, he said. AT&T has been extending fiber connections to cell towers and expanding Wi-Fi hotspots, he said.
Meanwhile, the single most important reason that people haven’t adopted broadband is cost, Meinrath said, but Atkinson said the price of broadband in the U.S. is pretty much the same as other countries. Instead of focusing on offering broadband to low income population, the debate is wrongly focused on pricing, he said. He also urged increasing computer adoption. While building up the network is a huge investment, Quinn said, investment in broadband infrastructure enables high penetration rates, he said. Broadband is a tough business and the U.S. has a level of competition that doesn’t exist in other parts of the world, he said.