National Broadband Plan? Feds Dream Big

On Wednesday morning, in a one-hour meeting in Washington D.C., for the first time ever, the federal government started work on a national broadband plan.

The FCC now has a year to survey the nation's internet pipes and recommend a plan of action or inaction to Congress, and is starting by asking for comments from citizens, telecoms, and public interest groups.

Hopefully, the first thing submitted to the commission is the Australian government's announcement Tuesday that it was bringing broadband to every Australian by spending $31 billion to lay thousands of miles of 100 Mbps fiber optic cable that will stop at nearly every porch in the country. The government-owned company that builds the network will then lease access to any and all companies that want to be ISPs, the government promised as it threw out bids from the existing telecom players saying the proposals had no value.

Sure Australia's "new super fast National Broadband Network" might be an election year promise, or a recession-era gimmick -- but man, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at least has a vision. Build something big. Build something useful.

As for the U.S.? No one has such hopes for the FCC's report.

So far the Obama administration has offered $7.2 billion in grants to be doled out by two separate federal agencies to give to companies to build out networks in "underserved" areas. The whole process is mired in semantic debates over what 'broadband,' 'unserved' and 'openness.'  And the incumbent players such as AT&T and Verizon are complaining about onerous openness requirements and are threatening to not even apply for the funds.

These are the players who have done everything in their power to suffocate innovation on the net and in the wireless world.

It's time to leapfrog these laggarts that never laid the fat pipes they got millions in tax breaks for. It's time to bypass the companies that have long had secret bandwidth caps, that force bundles of services on Americans, that for years said home users who wanted WiFi HAD to buy the ISPs equipment and that even now prohibit innovative bandwidth sharing operations like FON.

Hell, the current bunch of telecom executives don't even like operating the pipes -- they all want to start video services, stream music, become portals and get a slice of the ringtone market. They'd rather the internet had never progressed beyond Prodigy and AOL in the early 90s and rue the day they ever let a modem connect to a phone jack.

So, if Obama's mantra of change has any meaning at all, Julius Genachowski, Obama's nominee to head the FCC, will propose something big. A real National Broadband Network. Something outrageous. Something 'super fast' to use the Aussie parlance.

Something that will bring joy to the hearts of Twitter addicts in Silicon Valley, teens in L.A. ghettos, broadband-starved almond farmers in Northern California and wanna-be telecommuters in Appalachia. Something that will make the telecom and wireless lobbyists have nightmares. Something that will keep the telecom's hands from strangling the nation's broadband pipes.

It doesn't matter if Genachowski proposes an open-access national fiber network like Australia announced or just $200 billion in block grants to let states or regional confederations experiment with different models. The nation's plan just needs to be visionary -- like landing a man on the moon or creating a highway system.

And it needs to come with very firm, very clear rules that make sure that Americans get to run whatever apps they want, visit any site they like, feed the net content as well as consume it and do it all quickly for a fair price. And that's regardless of whether their connection is through a satellite, a 3G phone, 4G Wireless, DSL or the 'super fast National Broadband Network.'

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