NTIA Given Thumbs Up for Pace of BTOP, Thumbs Down for Scope
The Obama administration deserves high marks for the speed and aplomb with which it doled out Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grants, but BTOP was too narrow and conservative in the kinds of projects it picked to fund, said two speakers on a panel Tuesday at the monthly Broadband Breakfast in Washington.
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Craig Settles, a consultant and the president of Successful.com, was the most vocal in his criticism of the BTOP. He said the NTIA clung to “safe” projects rather than creative ones and excluded industry experts as well as community leaders. He said the broadband stimulus generally was dominated by a “Washington-centric” mentality that made a fetish of broadband speeds rather than community-driven goals to use broadband to build wealth. He blamed the influence of ILECs, which he said is limiting communities’ abilities to determine their own path to broadband deployment and use. He said the administration would be better served by broadly-framed block grants that focus on end users’ needs. “There’s a major disconnect between ‘We the people’ and ‘We the people who have all the money to give out,'” Settles said.
Jacquie Jones, executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium and the Public Media Corps, criticized broadband stimulus officials for not having a clear vision of what they meant by broadband “adoption.” She cited a survey of residents in the mostly black and mostly poor Anacostia neighborhood in Washington, where 51 percent of homes have broadband access but only 5 percent of users reported using broadband for news or information. The District of Columbia also offered free certification in Microsoft technology to some 11,000 Washingtonians; more than 10,000 of the packets came back unused, Jones said. Such incidents prove there’s “a disconnect” between government and neighborhoods, she said.
Charles Benton, CEO of a foundation that bears his name and a former member of the Gore Commission on digital broadcasting, took issue with Settles’ condemnation of the administration’s emphasis on “modeling.” He cited three projects in his home state of Illinois -- the Smart Communities project in Chicago, a project to bring broadband to seniors in public housing and a fiber-to-the-home initiative in downstate Champagne and Urbana -- as the kind of projects that can create a roadmap for effective broadband deployment. He did say, though, that he’s concerned about how the government will measure the effectiveness of the stimulus.
The government must do a better job of communicating the goals and pace of the broadband stimulus, said Lori Sherwood, broadband and cable administrator in Howard County, Md. The county is sharing a $115 million BTOP grant with other counties in Maryland. Even though “not a dime has been drawn down” from the grant, many residents think the stimulus is already over, Sherwood said. There are 1,700 jobs yet to be created.
NTIA Chief of Staff Tom Power said by e-mail that his agency had to be careful to invest tax dollars “wisely” and that the 233 projects funded “incorporate a variety of technologies and approaches, driven by local needs.”