September 2009

[Commentary] Because the nation's largest telecom companies clearly don't already exert enough political pressure on lawmakers crafting our national broadband plan, telecom vendors and broadband ISPs have created a new PR and lobbying operation called Broadband For America. The goal of the group, according to a group spokesman, is to be "a resource for policy-makers in an effort to ensure that the national broadband plan results in a faster, smarter and safer Internet." A brief introduction from the group's website: Broadband for America is dedicated to making broadband available to all Americans regardless of geographic location; economic position; or social level. This goal requires we have (1) an accurate map of where broadband exists and where it is lacking and (2) an agreed-upon definition of what broadband actually is. It's ironic, given the group's members have collectively spent billions of dollars preventing any of these goals from actually happening.

The fourth generation (4G) of cellphone technology can carry Internet data for smartphones and laptops as much as four times as fast as the current third-generation systems, and within a couple of years, most big carriers in the United States will offer some version of it. For Sprint, getting a head start on introducing 4G may be its best and last chance to repair its position in the market, which has been eroded by the company's disastrous merger with Nextel and its lapses in customer service. Through Clearwire, an affiliated company in which Sprint owns a 51 percent stake, Sprint is now offering the faster data service on laptops in Baltimore, Portland, Ore., and other cities for a total population of eight million people. By the end of the year, the service will be in 25 markets, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. A year after that, it hopes to reach about a third of the country's population, including New York and San Francisco. Verizon Wireless will not start to unveil its 4G network until the middle of next year. And AT&T will come out with its upgrade a year later, although its 3G technology can be upgraded to offer much faster speeds than the system used by Sprint and Verizon. But Sprint's 4G push comes with huge technical and financial risks. The company is using a technology called WiMax, which was initially developed by Intel to offer wireless service over large distances to computers in homes and offices, not to mobile phones.

A look at Question Box, a free, nonprofit telephone hot line that is meant to get information to people in remote areas who lack access to computers. The premise behind Question Box is that many barriers keep most of the developing world from taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge available through Web search engines, said Rose Shuman, the service's creator. That could be a drag on economic development. Instead of searching for information themselves, people in two rural agricultural communities in Uganda can turn to 40 Question Box workers who have cellphones. The workers dial into the call center and ask questions on behalf of the locals, or they put the call on speakerphone so the locals can ask for themselves. The operators then look up the requested information in a database and convey it to the workers, who pass it along to the villagers. The workers are compensated with cellphone airtime.

Americans are paying closer attention to political news today than in any year without a presidential election since Gallup began regularly tracking this measure in 2001. The 36% of Americans who today say they follow news about national politics "very closely" is down from the record-high 43% Gallup found in September 2008, but matches the level found in September 2004 -- two polls conducted during presidential election years. The previous high for a year without a presidential election was 31% in 2006 -- a midterm election year. The previous high for a year without a national election was 30%, in 2007. Apart from the quadrennial spike in news attention around presidential elections, Americans' focus on political news has gradually increased since 2001, when the percentage paying very close attention averaged 23%.