May 2013

The man who was charged with crafting a plan to bring broadband to all Americans isn’t happy about the way that plan is being implemented.

Currently with the Aspen Institute, Blair Levin said, “The FCC is becoming more of a political institution and less an expert agency.” Like other DC political institutions, he said, the commission is “increasingly caught up in a one-note narrative . . . of self-praise rather than focusing on providing the expertise and analytic agility necessary to adjust programs to provide bandwidth abundance to constituencies it is meant to serve.”

It was up to the FCC to implement the ideas recommended in the National Broadband Plan – and the way Levin sees it, much of that work has been left undone. One of the most important pieces of information to emerge out of the NBP was that the majority of the homes that can’t get broadband are in areas served by the nation’s largest price cap carriers – and that hasn’t changed much. Although he noted that CenturyLink is doing some upgrades, he said “AT&T is doing zero, and Verizon sold some lines to Frontier but they’re not doing anything with what they held on to.” Levin also argued in his recent speech that the FCC essentially “punted” on “the critical issue of contribution reform.”

In other words, the FCC’s new broadband-focused Universal Service program appears to be doomed to be funded as a percentage of carriers’ long-distance voice revenues – a methodology that is becoming increasingly unsustainable as long-distance voice revenues decline.

Lobbyists for the technology industry, having gained much of their wish list in the immigration bill drafted in the Senate, are now pushing to modify language they consider onerous.

The Senate bill, which is scheduled for markup in the Judiciary Committee on Thursday, would allow Silicon Valley companies to bring in many more foreign computer specialists on temporary work visas through a program known as H-1B. The bill also places restrictions on how companies can hire and fire employees, which the industry’s representatives in Washington are trying to massage. For one, the industry is worried about a provision, inserted by some Senate Democrats, that would allow companies to hire a foreigner only if “an equally qualified American” is not available. The draft allows the Department of Labor to scrutinize hiring decisions, which the industry calls undue interference. The bill also contains language that compels companies to promise not to lay off American workers within three months of hiring foreign guest workers. Additionally, if a company like I.B.M. places a foreign worker at a client company’s site — say, a bank — for a short-term project, the bill also requires the bank to prove it did not displace an American worker in the process.

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

When she and her colleagues studied the data, she found that people making calls or sending text messages originating at the Kericho tower were making 16 times more trips away from the area than the regional average. What’s more, they were three times more likely to visit a region northeast of Lake Victoria that records from the health ministry identified as a malaria hot spot. The tower’s signal radius thus covered a significant waypoint for transmission of malaria, which can jump from human to human via mosquitoes. Satellite images revealed the likely culprit: a busy tea plantation that was probably full of migrant workers. The implication was clear, Buckee says. “There will be a ton of infected [people] there.” This work is now feeding into a new set of predictive models she is building.