Did the National Broadband Plan spur innovation?

[Commentary] How has the US done on broadband deployment and adoption since the release of the National Broadband Plan in 2010?

• Deployment – The plan’s audacious goal of encouraging private investments to provide 100 million homes access to the Internet at speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020 now appears to be a foregone conclusion.
• Mobile – The Plan called on the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Commerce and the White House to allocate an additional 300 MHz of capacity by 2015 and 500 MHz by 2020. Those projections have proven conservative, requiring even more aggressive measures to feed the continuing mobile revolution.
• Adoption – The plan called for significant progress towards the long-term goal of getting all Americans connected to the broadband Internet, especially minority communities, lower-income households, and older and rural Americans, all of whom lagged significantly in getting online. Today, neither price nor availability of broadband are the factors that most determine why some groups are still behind the adoption curve. Instead, research has consistently shown that over the last five years non-users are more likely to identify a perceived lack of relevance of broadband Internet in their lives as the main reason not to adopt.
• Government applications – The plan, however, focused on broadband services that could improve governmental and regulated services, calling on entrepreneurs to use Internet technologies to kick start the transformation of health care, education, energy and public safety. The results here have been disappointing.

[Downes a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]