National Leadership Falls Short on Gig Speeds, Stakeholders Say

"The leadership in Washington doesn’t care about this,” said Google Fiber Vice President-Access Services Milo Medin. He said municipalities can make it easier for network providers to come in and cut costs. Fruitless discussions with the federal government led Google to initially decide, in the wake of the FCC National Broadband Plan’s release, to “do it ourselves” and build gigabit fiber networks, he added.

"What we need is leadership that’s looking toward the future,” said Blair Levin, Gig.U executive director, who coordinated work on the National Broadband Plan while at the FCC. The commission is “challenged” but not corrupt, he said. There is too much focus on the present telecom landscape, which is “completely irrelevant to the policy question” and reflects work of past years, not future, he said. Policy makers need to look ahead five to 10 years, he said. “That’s not the debate you see anywhere in the editorial pages or even in the halls of Congress or even in the FCC.”

Levin criticized the FCC’s Gigabit City Challenge, in which then-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in January before the U.S. Conference of Mayors urged every state to have at least one gigabit community by 2015 (CD Jan 22 p1). “That’s positively silly,” Levin said, slamming the impression that all that holds American communities back from building networks was an FCC chairman asking the mayors. The challenge created “great press” as intended but had “no analytic foundation, no strategy, no follow up” -- it “accomplished nothing” and exemplified “losing focus,” he said. “What’s the analysis behind it? What’s the strategy?” The FCC held a workshop on the topic in March, still under Genachowski. New FCC leadership, both current and incoming, seems to understand the importance of analytics better and make him more optimistic, Levin added. A commission spokesman declined to comment.

Google has “tried to work with communities to lower costs,” Medin said of the company’s strategy of brokering deals. “Make it easy,” he told municipalities, saying if they don’t, “enjoy your cable connection.” He reiterated that Google doesn’t ask for tax breaks or money but wants processes fixed. Incumbents shouldn’t be forced to build gigabit networks, Levin said. But “a new model,” akin to what Google is forging and other communities are developing, is necessary in this “period of testing these things out,” he said, referring to the monopoly-based social contract that’s disappearing. “What we need is a new paradigm.” Don’t blame incumbents for “harvesting investments” made on the wireline side, an “entirely rational decision,” he said.

Local interests and coordination should drive the discussions about fast networks and upgrades, said Craig Settles, a community consultant and activist who hosts the Internet-radio show Gigabit Nation. “What I constantly find is that if you go to the right stakeholders, they will develop a skeleton of what makes sense,” he said, calling them “your initial major investors” as well as customers for any potential network in question. Settles outlined several steps communities might take to form business plans and pursue such projects. He pointed out the potential role of cooperatives and nonprofits. “At a certain level, this becomes a marketing exercise,” he added, describing ways to hype projects as “creating a crusade.” Levin judged it “an organizing challenge.”

Gigabit speeds will achieve value in countless ways, speakers said, acknowledging certain application uses but also their value as a whole. “We are substituting bandwidth for all sorts of things that used to require atoms,” Levin said. “The answer is driven by that psychology of bandwidth abundance.” Progress is made through “exchange of inputs,” he said, hearkening to historical examples. Google offers no tiered speeds, only a gigabit or the free slow service, because everyone can do “a bunch more” with more fast connections, Medin said, saying the company bundles a terabyte of Google Drive with each of its premium offerings to drive that use. Google also values its symmetrical offering and that people “don’t have to contend” for bandwidth among different devices with such faster speeds, he said. Medin questioned whether an open access model would work in North America given the regulatory environment and the transport costs involved with such fast networks. “The value of the gigabit is in the aggregate,” Settles said, judging it is what “makes sense.”