The first goal of the FCC’s recent National Broadband Plan is to ensure at least 100 million US homes have access to Internet connections with download speeds of at least 100 Mbps by the end of the decade (the year 2020). This goal strikes me as not being a terribly ambitious. I only have a single data point to support that conclusion, which is typically referred as an anecdote.
One of these is not like the others.
During a business trip to Japan last year, I traveled to Fukuoka to visit my good friend Prof. Toshiya Jitsuzumi. (According to Wikipedia Fukuoka is Japan’s eighth most populous city and its second youngest). Prof. Jitsuzumi invited me to give two talks: one to Kyushu University’s Faculty of Economics and one to his undergraduate students in communications economics. To the undergraduates, I gave a lecture about the policy and economics of Next Generation Access Networks in the European Union. I found Prof. Jitsuzumi’s students to be bright and engaging. In the middle of the lecture, the students had some trouble understanding one of my stats on the number of homes passed by fibre optic access networks in the EU. At first, I thought the confusion was due to my weak Japanese language skills. After a bit of back and forth, I discovered the source of the confusion. Prof Jitsuzumi’s students all have fibre optic connections to their homes. I was the only one in the room who did not have a fibre optic Internet connection to his home (NB: I live in a suburb of Bonn, Germany). The source of the confusion was that they were questioning why one would want to count homes passed. This is not obvious if you and all your classmates already has a fibre optic connection.
Insight: Granted Prof. Jitsuzumi’s class is not a representative sample set, but I can’t help feeling that the FCC is trying to catch the US up in ten years to where Japan is now. From what I have been reading on the listservs, given current pace of deployment of FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0, the market will accomplish this goal on its own. This fact begs the question what is need for governmental intervention. Instead, the FCC should propose a more ambitious goal (one that might have a higher risk of failure) and devise a road map necessary for achieving that goal. Perhaps this will come out in follow on work to National Broadband Plan.
