An Action Plan for America | Using Technology and Innovation to Address our Nation's Critical Challenges

by Jonathan Rintels

CONTENTS

Executive Summary

Reaching For The American Dream By Connecting Our Nation

Persuasive research indicates that connecting our nation to broadband will bring remarkable economic, social, cultural, personal, and other benefits to our citizens.

While stimulating broadband supply is necessary to achieving the goal of universal, affordable, and robust broadband, it is not sufficient. The NBS must also promote initiatives to stimulate broadband demand. These include programs to ensure that all Americans have access to the digital skills and tools necessary to realize broadband's enormous potential benefits. They also include initiatives that employ broadband-powered applications to address critical challenges facing our nation, including economic growth, job creation, health care, education, public safety, energy consumption, climate change, and others.

By promoting both the supply of and the demand for broadband, a well-conceived NBS will establish a "virtuous circle" in which an increased supply of robust and affordable broadband stimulates creation of applications that produce wide-ranging, valuable social benefits that then cause citizens to demand even more robust and affordable broadband; which in turn stimulates greater investment in more robust broadband; which then stimulates the creation of even more beneficial applications that cause citizens to demand even more robust and affordable broadband.

In this section, we recommend several initiatives to address our nation's critical challenges that will have the added salutary benefit of stimulating demand for universal, affordable, and robust broadband.

Economic Development And Job Creation

Universal deployment and adoption of robust and affordable broadband will stimulate economic growth and create good-paying jobs, according to several private and government studies.

Health Care

Telecommunications technology such as broadband offers a tremendous opportunity to make America healthier and allow Americans to live longer...

Education

We must educate new generations of digitally literate citizens to ensure they are able to compete successfully in today's global workforce and participate in our increasingly knowledge-based society.

Energy And The Environment

By implementing a National Broadband Strategy that includes initiatives to help Americans utilize broadband to reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide gas emissions, the new Administration can quickly and meaningfully address the threats that energy insecurity and environmental degradation pose to our nation.

Public Safety and Homeland Security

One of the highest duties of any nation's government is assuring the public's safety and security. One vital element in providing that safety and security is a strong and resilient communications system.

Reinvigorating Democracy and Government

The ability of citizens to use YouTube, and to meaningfully engage in community affairs over the Internet, is entirely dependent on their ability to access the Internet via broadband.

Conclusion

Appendix A: A Broadband Action Plan

Appendix B: Draft Executive Order on President's Council On Broadband, Innovation And Competitiveness

End Notes

Comments

I am in sync with this article but there is a missing component, the Innovative, new technology component. I looked at a lot of the RFI inputs and saw one from a company called TelePulse Technologies. They give action plans for the rural and underserved to get them up to 20Mbps and beyond without capital expenditure using their patented DTMD technology. They raise the bar for all Americans no matter where they live. This stuff is probably pretty early stage but it looks like something we should be backing because the phone companies never will and private funding won’t go for just solving a rural problem (the market size is not juicy enough). If I read the RFI response correctly the price tag could be less than 10% of what it would cost with DSL. Face it, rural customers have been lied to or ignored or told they need to be happy with some convoluted solution that gets them less than 500kbps on a good day. Let us be brave enough to attack the technology side of the problem since the major players do not seem to think it is worth their real attention.