National Broadband Plan Policy Evaluation

The Fiber-to-the-Home Council met with staff at the Federal Communications Commission to discuss a new study which finds:

1) At current course and speed, high-performance broadband will be available to a minority of US homes by 2015 and many homes will have only one provider of such service.

2) This base case deployment scenario will be inadequate for enabling nextgeneration services such as HD/3D video, cloud computing, and very large downloads/uploads due to throughput constraints and QoS limitations.

3) Accelerating high-performance broadband deployment to 80% of the US (101.6M homes) by 2015 will facilitate widespread adoption of next-generation applications.

4) Incremental annual consumer and public good benefits over the base case stemming from services enabled by high-performance broadband acceleration could reach $5.7B (if 54% homes passed), $8.9B (if 69% HP), or $11.3B (if 80% HP).

5) The total investment required for deploying high-performance broadband at an accelerated pace would be $33.313 (if 54% HP), $62.2B (if 69% HP), or $89.2B (if 80% HP) - scales of investment that are possible given historical capital
expenditure levels of major service providers.