PolicyBlog

I read through Harvard’s Berkman Center report which was led by Yochai Benkler.  Okay, it was 232 pages so I “mostly read through it” to paraphrase a famous movie “The Princess Bride” (see it – there is a great scene where the hero is “only mostly dead”.)   I did read the substantive analysis at the beginning (over 100 pages) and skipped only some of the country reports. Benkler and his team of investigators can be commended for the effort that went into what was no doubt a substantial... Read More

Our guest blogger today is David E. Young, Vice President, Verizon Federal Regulatory Affairs.  See the end of the post for his impressive bio - CZ.There seems to be some confusion around Verizon’s filing suggesting that the FCC keep a baseline definition for broadband as 768 kbps down and 200 kbps up. The implication here is that we want to keep the speed set low so we won’t have to upgrade our networks.   From where we stand, this is clearly absurd. Verizon is deploying the country’s most... Read More

It’s clear that the support for a national broadband plan is growing everyday.  The FCC’s efforts to this end, supported by their new blog, Blogband, are underway and are only aided by reports like the one by CWA. Their data show, among other things, that US broadband is strongest in the more densely populated states (their top four, DE, RI, NJ, and MA, are all served by Verizon). It’s also important to remember that U.S. deployments are very different than the countries we are often compared... Read More

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... Read More

Broadband take-up by U.S. households and businesses is among the strongest in the world, at least three times larger than the 20-percent level claimed by a European Commission spokesman quoted by the NYT. The number cited in the article is simply wrong. The Pew Research and Internet Life Project reported in June that 63 percent of U.S. households have broadband access. Leichtman Research Group research points to a level greater than two-thirds.  Among those who don’t subscribe to broadband,... Read More