MoneyWatch Tech

FCC Broadband Plan: Lofty Ideals, Flawed Logic

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: March 15, 2010 / 1:57 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will release its broadband plan tomorrow to Congress. The FCC wants Congress to support significant expansion of wireline/cable and wireless broadband Internet access because "broadband can transform key sectors to provide better quality of life." The question is, whose life? The average citizen? Or the average person whose fortunes rise with the federal budget? Because many of the FCC's basic arguments don't add up.

The FCC's rationale are its working recommendations, which came out in February. Unfortunately, the FCC equates almost everything with the term broadband. For example, here are some of the topics the FCC plans to address:

expand "employment assistance, including job training and placement services, on a scalable online platform"
"provide technology training for small and disadvantaged businesses" to get small businesses to increase productivity through broadband use
remote health monitoring and electronic healthcare records
a lack of broadband connection or high broadband prices for "many healthcare providers"
increase broadband access in schools because "online learning can reduce time required to learn by half"
modernize the nation's electrical grid
give consumers "access to and privacy of real-time and historical digital energy information through changes to state and federal policies"
release more government data on digital platforms and increase the number of online citizen services
create "an interoperable nationwide broadband wireless public safety network with appropriate capacity and resiliency" and realize that next generation 9-1-1 services are "hampered by a lack of intergovernmental coordination, as well as jurisdictional, legal and funding issues"

All laudable goals, for certain, but in many cases, a lack of broadband isn't the issue. The government could encourage online job training and placement, but companies that have ignored training in the past have done so because they didn't see its value, not because of a lack of broadband. Electronic healthcare records face huge obstacles to implementation, including the cottage-industry nature of healthcare and providers not wanting to invest the money. The issue isn't broadband. Claiming that online instruction can speed learning is an interesting claim, but the lack of online work doesn't explain why educational results in this country have declined over time, and it doesn't explain why the instruction, if that valuable, couldn't simply be sent on a set of CDs or DVDs, if schools don't have the necessary connections. Broadband won't fix the electrical grid or convince the federal government to cough up data that it could have published at any time. Unfortunately, the FCC so badly wants to justify broadband expansion and improvement that it infers cause and effect where there is none.

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