Competition, Federal Money Called Needed to Extend Broadband
Government needs to play a much larger role in getting broadband to the most rural consumers if this country “is serious” about making the Internet ubiquitous, said Daniel Mitchell, vice president of legal affairs for the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, a trade association that represents small rural providers. He spoke at the Pike & Fischer broadband conference Thursday.
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Getting the necessary broadband infrastructure to the remaining 7 to 9 million people who still lack access will cost between $14 and $45 billion while upgrades to the systems that offer access to 90 percent of the country will cost “hundreds of billions,” said Mitchell. That kind of investment would require significant help from the Universal Service Fund and increased regulation, he said. The other panelists, most of whom represented large providers, disagreed with Mitchell.
Private investment accounts for about $60 billion of broadband deployment annually, dwarfing the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus that will be doled out over the next two years, noted Jonathan Banks, senior vice president at USTelecom. Maintaining or increasing that level of investment should be a priority of the government, through incentives or by promoting competition among the carriers, he said.
Widely considered as the “next generation” of connectivity, fiber deployment has relied on deregulation -- the FCC’s 2003 Triennial Review Order in particular -- as a major spur to recent investment, said Timothy Regan, senior vice president at Corning, a fiber supplier. Since 2003, large providers have invested as much in building out fiber networks as the previous 17 years combined, he said.
Thomas Sugrue, vice president of government affairs at T-Mobile USA, said T-Mobile and other companies are quickly realizing that there is a serious need for more spectrum. Despite winning the largest amount of AWS-1 spectrum in 2006, the jump in demand for mobile bandwidth could push T-Mobile to its limits soon, Sugrue said. Tim Warren