Wireless Broadband Connections Remain Undercounted, CTIA Contends

Guttman-McCabe noted that from June 2007 to June 2008, the number of high-speed wireless subscribers soared from 35.3 million to 59.7 million and mobile wireless’ share of total broadband connections increased from 35 percent to 45 percent. Mobile uploads to YouTube have increased 1700 percent in the last six months, he said.

“With higher-speed networks, third- and fourth- generation devices, exploding applications markets, the ecosystem is just changing before our eyes,” Guttman-McCabe said. “One of the biggest challenges is going to be how we're going to factor in wireless. When you look at OECD measurements, they explicitly exclude wireless broadband. How are we going to factor in things such as pre-paid and a la carte services?”

Link Hoewing, vice president of Internet and technology policy at Verizon, said some broadband trends are clear based on the findings of numerous studies. Seniors, those 64 and older, are much less likely to have a broadband connection than younger Americans, he said. “Most homes with incomes above $75,000 are connected, but only half the homes with less than $30,000 in income are, and 37 percent of them have a broadband connection.”

But some trends are harder to understand, he suggested. Rural deployment is lower than in urban areas, but more blue collar workers on average live in rural America and “many of them don’t have access [to broadband] at work and don’t get exposed to the technology,” Hoewing said. Also, more seniors live in rural America. While fewer blacks have wired connections they are “on average much more aggressive users of mobile data services.”

One big issue the FCC will have to address is the privacy of data, panelists agreed. “There are different types of data on people and some are more sensitive than others,” John Horrigan, consumer research director for the FCC’s broadband initiative said. “Health information is very personal and sensitive to people, so treating that differently is important. People don’t feel the same necessarily about what I would call marketing data.” People also don’t want surprises, he said: “What really concerns people is when data is used in ways they didn’t expect it to be used.”

Privacy expectations vary among different age groups, said Kate Williams, assistant professor in library and information science at the University of Illinois. “Young people are positively reckless … about privacy,” she said. “They accept that its’ gone and they don’t really care and they're managing to find the good in that.”

Horrigan said the agency welcomes advice on how to better understand deployment. “The FCC is charged in the course of developing a plan with gathering lots of data,” Horrigan said. “We'll also be conducting a survey of Americans on various dimensions of how they use broadband and, particularly, why they are not using broadband.”

Williams said the U.S. starts from a strong position as it looks at gathering more data. “We are ahead of many countries because he have the census,” Williams said. “We have a tradition from 1790 to collect data about ourselves and to do it in a consistent way, decade after decade.” Still, on broadband, “We have things to do. … We're not at the front,” Williams said.

Underserved Demographics

Low broadband adoption is holding back many facets of U.S. society, panelists said Wednesday at a second FCC broadband workshop. The FCC’s national broadband plan must provide for reaching out to underserved groups to encourage adoption and must include ways to measure the success of efforts to improve uptake, they said.

Broadband has many benefits for older people, including brain stimulation, greater communication with family and friends and post-retirement job opportunities, said Charles Davidson, the director of the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute at New York Law School. But only about 30 percent of the 37 million people over 65 in the U.S. are broadband adopters, Davidson said. The reasons include the lack of a home computer, lack of awareness, skepticism about broadband’s usefulness and fears of identity theft, he said. Greater outreach by individuals, government and public- private collaborations are critical to spurring adoption in the group, he said.

American Indian tribes are held back by the prices of computers and service plans, said Valerie Fast Horse, the director of information technology for the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in Idaho. A wireless ISP serves the tribe, but only 550 pay for subscriptions, she said. Many more instead use a free computer lab that the tribe has set up, she said. Innovative applications such as a blog covering local elections have improved acceptance of broadband but haven’t produced many more paid subscribers, she said.

Many African-Americans don’t adopt broadband because it’s too expensive and they don’t understand why they need it, said Media and Technology Institute Director Nicol Turner-Lee. But, she said, “You cannot break the trajectory of poverty if you don’t have access to a resource that serves to empower and connect you to information that improves the quality of your life.” E-government, school and other useful applications provide incentive for people to adopt, she said. And it may be possible to “re-purpose” nontraditional broadband-connected devices for educational, economic and health care uses, Turner-Lee said. Though PC adoption is low among African-Americans, many have cellphones, gaming consoles and MP3 players, she said. “As outrageous as it may seem, it may be kind of interesting to take your blood pressure” using a Nintendo Wii, she said.

For health care, “broadband availability is a matter of life or death,” said Global Telemedicine Group President Jay Sanders. “If you have a traffic accident and you're brought in with a crushed chest injury in a rural hospital, you have no access to a trauma surgeon,” he said. With today’s broadband-enabled telemedicine technologies, though, “you do.” Also, broadband allows doctors to bring the exam room to the patient’s home or workplace, he said. Doctors can take more accurate blood pressure measures in a patient’s office because that’s where the patient spends most of his or her time, he said.

The FCC’s adoption plan should focus efforts on institutions and not necessarily specific end users, said Craig Settles, the founder of Successful.com. Hospitals, large business and other “anchors” are more able to fund networks, and the benefits will trickle down to end users, he said. Focusing on government network needs first, for example, will ultimately result in new e-gov apps that will spur wider adoption, he said.

The plan must include a mechanism to measure the success of adoption strategies, Settles said. After implementing the plan, policymakers should, for example, monitor how broadband sells, as well as how many new jobs, new companies, and new home-based businesses are established, he said.

Some public schools have undertaken serious digital literacy programs as a way to spur adoption, said Douglas Levin, deputy executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education. Michigan and West Virginia both require students to take some online courses, he said.

Many questions about adoption remain, said moderator Brian David, the FCC broadband team’s adoption director, as he closed the panel. “We somewhat purposely brought a series of demographic slices to the table,” he said. “Ultimately what we have to think about is … not demographics only, but more attitudinal and psychographic” information. - Howard Buskirk, Adam Bender