I read and concur with my PolicyBlog colleague David Fish. Here are some additional thoughts:
The FCC has embarked on a fact finding mission as part of its effort to develop a National Broadband Plan as required by the stimulus legislation. Blair Levin, who is heading the effort to develop the plan under Chairman Genachowski, has laid out a process to gather as many useful and implementable ideas as possible and as much fact based support for ideas as can be developed.
This is good and the program Blair has established to get input for the FCC’s work in drafting a plan to submit to Congress by next year is comprehensive.
But in the broadband space, developing facts and supporting data is not always easy or straightforward. The Pew Trust, with its much lauded Internet and American Life program, has been doing research for example on broadband adoption and use for years. It has found that there are many factors contributing to the hesitancy of many citizens to adopt broadband. It is not a simple story and the facts are often misstated. And it is hard to establish baselines and look objectively at the data when exaggerated stories get circulated.
An example is a headlined story in the New York Times “Europe is Beating U. S. in Broadband”. It is not what it appears to be. The facts don’t support the conclusion or many of the quotes in the article. But the headline was duly copied and reported in many other stories.
In the article Martin Selmayr, spokesman for European Union Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, said that there are “23 percent of European homes and businesses using fixed-line broadband, compared with 20 percent in the United States.” This is inaccurate on a number of levels. The 23% figures Selmayr cites for Europe is a penetration figure based on “number of access lines per 100 persons”, not a “homes and businesses connected to broadband” number. We know this because the other numbers cited in the story by Mr. Selmayr for other European countries match those in an OECD report that uses “number of access lines per 100 persons” as a key metric. So, just on this level, Selmayr is creating a false impression by mixing apples and oranges.
But he then goes on to say that Europe beats the U. S. because our country has only 20% of its homes and businesses connected to broadband. While it is not entirely clear where he gets this figure, it is flat wrong. While gauging broadband penetration based on per capita access lines has its own set of problems – such as penalizing those countries like the U.S. with larger households – this number attributed to the U.S. is simply wrong. Even using the “number of access lines per 100 persons” metric reported by the OECD, the U. S. actually stands at 26.7 access lines per 100 persons, not 20.
What concerns me about headlines like this is that they are touted as important indicators in the discussion around broadband. People remember “head turning” facts more than they do other information. In point of fact, the U. S. is making tremendous progress in getting homes connected to broadband, moving from 55 percent of homes last year in the Pew survey to 63% this year. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed by Pew said they had more than three choices in broadband providers. In addition to having an unparalleled level of facilities-based competition among different broadband platforms, the U.S. is also making great strides in deployment of next-generation fiber networks and 4G wireless networks. So, the many articles and blogs that quoted Mr. Sylmayr or the NY Times article spread more misinformation at a time when the FCC is trying to get a real focus on the state of broadband in America.
The underlying report by the European Commission that Mr. Selmayr was supposedly referencing in his comments is accurate in its portrayal of the data it was reporting on. My review of the report suggests that it does not claim that Europe is ahead of the U. S. in any particular metric regarding broadband. It seems that this may have been a rushed statement trying to make a point. That is silly when we are engaged now in a serious effort to gather the facts about broadband in the U. S. It makes no sense and moves no balls forward to make these kinds of statements in an effort to create more debates about global ‘winners and losers.’