Broadband Called Railroad of 21st Century
Consumers need more access to public Wi-Fi, said Travis Litman, legal adviser for FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, during a broadband summit sponsored by the 706 Joint Conference. The FCC also needs to keep tabs on innovative broadband access programs across the country and modernize the Lifeline program, he said. “More than half of us online have used public Wi-Fi at some point and for many American households, it’s their only means of getting online,” Litman said. “So having more Wi-Fi in more places means more opportunities for students to get their homework done.” Rosenworcel was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the multiple-panel event held Wednesday afternoon after the NARUC summer committee meetings came to a close, but was pulled away by other business at the last minute. The panels focused on high-speed technology and the availability of services, broadband service adoption and innovation.
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Deb Socia, Next Century Cities executive director, said technology is what people need to be successful, so to turn that into a partisan effort is not right. Next Century Cities supports cities creating their own networks or having input into helping solve the access problem locally because they know what is needed, though it hopes for an easier, more national solution as well, Socia said. “If the market solved this problem, we wouldn’t be building local networks, but it hasn’t solved the problem,” she said. “So therefore, we must allow our cities to do whatever it takes to get where they want to be.”
Sometimes commissioners need to step outside of their regulatory roles and think about the issue of adoption, said Commissioner Philip Jones of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission during the panel about broadband adoption. A positive way to achieve better broadband adoption is to facilitate conversations and workshops, Jones said. “Rather than regulate at some times, some of the best things we can do is be a facilitator,” he said. “We bring people together to try to define the problem and come up with solutions. … I think we need to step up to the plate.”
Quoting hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky, Robert Mayer, USTelecom vice president-industry and state affairs, compared looking to the future of broadband to looking to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. Broadband is going to a place where no one in the industry is going to be able to predict perfectly, he said. There is no way to know what the investment in Wi-Fi is going to be in the next 10 years -- what the cost, competitors and other technologies are going to be or what consumers are going to want from that industry -- Mayer said. “Nobody knows that... . But I do know … that things are going to change and that change is not going to be driven by policy or government. That change is going to be driven by innovation and by consumer interests and desires. And we can’t predict any of that.” Because of that, it’s imperative to take into account the enormous uncertainty about what is going to determine whether or not an investment is going to succeed or fail, Mayer said.
People can now live wherever they want and can be part of a global economy, two conditions that have not existed simultaneously, said Louis Zacharilla, co-founder of Intelligent Community Forum. However, what’s necessary to keep that going is having a way to connect people, which in most cases is broadband, he said. Now that society has effectively eliminated the “middle of nowhere” concept, there needs to be the construction of a “new railroad” that can connect those people, much like the actual railroad system did in earlier days of this country, Zacharilla said. Once the railroad was built, people could conduct economic activity, which is why today there is a need for this new railroad concept. “Broadband is the same thing,” he said. “The proposition is the same, except the railroad goes everywhere and the new cargo are ideas, they are applications, they are the ability to collaborate.”