September 2009

It's mid-term review time for the broadband team: on Tuesday, with 141 days left to go before the deadline to deliver a National Broadband Plan to Congress, the National Broadband Plan team is providing the Federal Communications Commission with a major status report on the plan. The team will be laying out some specifics of what it has found out about broadband speeds, spectrum and fiber resources, the increasing cost of digital exclusion, and the benefits to the economy and to individual citizens that broadband can provide. Levin writes: "We'll look at the adequacy of the tools available to promote robust, universal broadband — tools such as universal service. We'll be fielding questions about all of this and seeking guidance from the commissioners about whether we're on the right track in our examination as we proceed toward developing recommendations for the plan. We also want the public to weigh on the facts and analysis we will present so we can make adjustments now, while we are still at a relatively early point in the process, rather than later, after decisions have been made."

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking public comment specific comment regarding the ability of Small and Disadvantaged Businesses (SDBs) to incorporate broadband technology into their business models.

The FCC has ten questions:

a) What percentage of SDBs currently use broadband? What are the current speeds and prices of these services? What applications are being run over these connections?

b) What obstacles prevent SDBs from taking advantage of broadband technology: (i) lack of available broadband; (ii) lack of affordable broadband or budgetary constraints; (iii) digital literacy concerns; or (iv) social/cultural considerations? Please comment on these or any other obstacles.

c) For SDBs in traditional businesses that may not yet rely on broadband, such as car repair shops, dry-cleaners, bodega owners, and tool and die makers, how can broadband improve their businesses? Please provide specific examples and data where available. What needs to be done to encourage such businesses to utilize broadband technology?

d) Are there data regarding how many new jobs have been created when SDBs take advantage of broadband? What is the impact of broadband adoption on SDB productivity and innovation? How do these data vary across sectors?

e) What role should institutions such as the Federal Communications Commission, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Labor, local Chambers of Commerce, community colleges and other community organizations play in ensuring that SDBs take better advantage of broadband technology?

f) What challenges do SDBs owned by limited-English speakers face in using broadband technology?

g) As government rolls out broadband stimulus funds to reach unserved and underserved communities and as broadband construction occurs generally, how do we ensure that SDBs are able to participate in the construction process and benefit from that construction?

h) How do we ensure that SDBs participate as information and content providers on the Internet?

i) How can public/private partnerships assist the growth of SDBs and their use of broadband technology? Please provide specific examples. Should the Commission facilitate creation of public-private partnerships for this purpose?

j) What else should the National Broadband Plan include specifically to assist SDBs?

Comments are due November 2, 2009.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, in a request for clarification, is asking the Federal Communications Commission to clarify that nothing the agency has done limits states' authority to collect broadband data from infrastructure providers like cable operators. NARUC said that some states' efforts to collect data on areas served, unserved, or underserved by broadband "have been frustrated by reliance on voluntary responses." It pointed to various cases involving cable modem or DSL services in which the FCC concluded that combined data and Internet services "should exist in a minimally regulated environment." NARUC said, "There is no question that Congress wants states to have this data. A declaratory ruling -- specifying only that no FCC order or regulation currently limits state authority to collect any data from any broadband infrastructure or service provider -- will clear up any remaining ambiguity over the scope of existing state authority and facilitate state mapping, and other deployment initiatives."

Government-appointed watchdogs debuted on Monday the much-anticipated overhaul of Recovery.gov, featuring sophisticated pictorial representations of spending data, advanced search functions, multimedia tutorials and some downloads. The upgrade does not include new stimulus results, such as jobs statistics, which will be funneled into the site later in October. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board intends the site to be a window into the Obama administration's economic recovery effort and has the expectation that the public -- concerned citizens, academia, journalists, agencies, states, recipients, Congress and special interest groups -- will visit the site to learn more about how the $787 billion in stimulus funds are being spent. The site represents 10 weeks of work by a team of vendors that were awarded a potential $18 million contract on July 8. Stimulus contracts granted by federal agencies will not appear until Oct. 15, and information reported by the private sector and states will not be posted until Oct. 30. But board officials said they wanted the public to learn and test out the new features before then.