This obviously concerned us, as that list means far more than simply being fast. As our analysis suggested, America needs a critical mass of communities with world-leading bandwidth in order to develop the human capital required to design, build, operate and, above all, innovate on top of the best networks in the world.

Thankfully, it  looks like that list is finally about to get a little more red, white and blue.

The key to boosting economic development

This week’s announcement that Google is bringing its Google Fiber product to Austin, last week’s news that the North Carolina Next Generation Network (NC NGN) project had eight bidders, and similar projects in communities including Chattanooga, Chicago, Seattle and Gainesville, suggest that local leaders are starting to crack the code for how to drive network upgrades in their communities.

What these efforts have in common is leadership that understands that world-leading connectivity is the foundation for future economic development and competitiveness. Though still nascent, anecdotal evidence is mounting of success stories, from the bond rating increase Kansas City received (thanks in part to Google Fiber), to the miraculous turnaround of Chattanooga, which as Tom Friedman reports has changed the city from “a slowly declining and deflating urban balloon, to one of the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee.”

Local leaders are learning to build agreements with private enterprise that work for both the private and public interests. These efforts lower deployment and operating costs as well as risk, while at the same time creating numerous public benefits including attractive service levels and reasonable consumer pricing. These agreements, in effect, are new versions of the social contracts that enabled phone companies and cable companies to build out their networks in the last century.

While the network upgrade may seem to be only about speed, in actuality it will also drive other public improvements as well. Expectations are that the upgrade Kansas City is now enjoying will result in increased adoption of information technologies, more effective government use of broadband for education, health care, public safety and other public goods – as well as creating competition.

Of course, this is a dance in which it takes “two to tango,”  and it would not work without private sector entities willing to find a way to provide abundant bandwidth. Google deserves much praise for leading the charge, and the fact that the Research Triangle’s NC NGN project received a number of bids –  including from the incumbent cable provider Time Warner Cable – suggests others are finally starting to figure out the new math.

Local leaders can’t wait for federal moves

Federal policymakers certainly understand the importance of faster networks, but as a recent workshop at the FCC demonstrated: The federal government’s actions, other than a one-time Recovery Act investment, have been neutral, at best, and probably negative.  There are positive steps that can, and should, be taken.

Sen, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) wisely noted that the E-rate program – which delivers bandwidth to schools and libraries – should be updated to provide gigabit connectivity to the classroom. This program could be structured to catalyze broader community upgrades.  Other federal agencies can be enlisted to support community efforts in ways that will not cost taxpayers more but will result in better services.

Unfortunately, as we discussed in a recent speech, the federal government seems ill equipped to approach the opportunity with the analytic, experimental, action-oriented frame of mind that we see in the Gig.U communities. We are hopeful that with new leadership coming to the FCC, this will improve. To date, however, it has been local leadership in partnership with companies willing to invest ahead of the current market that is driving the engine for American leadership in a big bandwidth economy.

For gardeners everywhere spring’s arrival is a time for new beginnings and hope; fail to tend to your garden, however, and you don’t get to harvest.  So it is with bandwidth: There is still much to do, the projects that are underway still have hurdles to cross, more communities need to consider how existing projects chart a path for their community, and the federal government must figure out how to move beyond rhetorical support. But now we are finally taking the first steps, have seedlings taking root. With a little luck, they will flourish and spread at gigabit speed.

Blair Levin is the Executive Director of the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, or Gig.U; he led the development of the National Broadband Plan in 2010 for the Federal Communications Commission. Ellen Satterwhite is Program Director at Gig. U; follow her on Twitter @esatts.

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There are three parts to the network, a fiber-to-home element that will reach 50,000 homes in 12 Seattle neighborhoods. The network will also take advantage of point-to-point wireless, which companies such as WebPass are using, as well as offer some kind of mobile broadband service as well. From the release:

To provide initial coverage beyond the 12 demonstration neighborhoods, Gigabit Seattle intends to build a dedicated gigabit broadband wireless umbrella to cover Seattle providing point-to-point radio access up to one gigabit per second. This will be achieved by placing fiber transmitters on top of 38 buildings across Seattle. These transmitters can beam fiber internet to multifamily housing and offices across Seattle, even those outside the twelve demonstration neighborhoods, as long as they are in a line of sight. Internet service would be delivered to individual units within a building through existing wiring. This wireless coverage can provide network and Internet services to customers that do not have immediate access to fiber in the city.

This will be Gigabit Squared’s second fiber commitment under an arrangement it has with the Gig.U project headed by Blair Levin. Levin, who led the efforts to write the National Broadband Plan, formed Gig.U to make sure the U.S. maintains a competitive edge in broadband infrastructure. His idea is to build gigabit networks in U.S. college towns so students and researchers can keep up with the broadband speeds that other countries are developing.

Gigabit Squared’s first commitment was in Chicago, which it announced in October. Chicago had already announced a plan to dig trenches for fiber-to-the-home service as part of an upgrade to the city’s utilities, so Gigabit Squared probably saw a willing municipal partner and jumped.

What’s fascinating about all of these models is that they are bypassing traditional ISPs, such as the telcos and cable firms to build out city-specific programs where the municipality and a private company work together to build out the network. Google took this same approach in Kansas City when it chose that town for its Google Fiber deployment. And lest other municipalities feel left out (ahem, Austin!!) Google said this week that it would expand Google Fiber to more cities, while Gigabit Squared still has four more towns left if it follows its original plan.

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As a general rule, a Romney victory would most benefit the incumbent telcos, according to a report out Friday from Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank. From the note:

We believe the two Bells would gain the most from a Republican victory and de-regulatory telecom thrust, while some of their rivals would do better under the Democrats, including non-Bell wireless carriers, CLECs, and other upstarts. We suspect that cable will do fairly well under either party, with some risks, and that midsize telcos, DBS, edge/tech giants, and broadcasters face various trade-offs.

The reason for this can be summed up in a pithy quote provided by Richard Bennett, a senior research fellow at the industry-dominated think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. When I asked what was at stake for the FCC and telecom policy in this year’s elections, he said, “It’s either going to get down to Chairman McDowell or Chairman Levin,” referring to current Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell or a Democrat heading up the FCC in the model of Blair Levin. Bennett said that Levin, who helped write the National Broadband Plan and is now spearheading a gigabit fiber project to connect U.S. universities, might not actually take on the Chairman role, but someone who thinks like he does would be a likely candidate.

Both potential commissioners see a role for markets in broadband policy, but the Levins of his comparison would be more likely to view the markets in the U.S. as needing regulatory oversight to function competitively, whereas McDowell would be more content to let the market function, Bennett said. With that in mind, let’s get to some specifics. There are three big areas that will come up after the election: spectrum, network neutrality and the retirement of the copper telephone network.

Congress doesn’t share spectrum!

On spectrum policy, there are a few big issues that fall under the bigger scope of needing more spectrum for wireless broadband. The FCC is currently proposing an incentive auction that would offer TV broadcasters the chance to sell some of their airwaves and no matter who wins on Tuesday, that should continue to go through. But as part of that auction, there’s also the plan to keep some of that spectrum for unlicensed uses as opposed to selling it all to the carriers — or other buyers. Unlicensed spectrum can also be used for broadband. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth operate in unlicensed bands.

Harold Feld, a senior vice president with Public Knowledge, explained that in the past few years spectrum has become a partisan issue, which means even something as beneficial as more unlicensed spectrum could become controversial. “There’s a handful of Republicans who hate unlicensed spectrum in the same way that the Grinch hates Christmas. They don’t want to let people have access to it for free.”

But the FCC is also looking at the issue of how much spectrum a carrier can own and still have a competitive market, as well as the idea of spectrum sharing as recommended in a recent President’s Council of Advisors on Policy and Technology report. Under a Republican FCC, spectrum screens probably won’t be a priority. And if Romney takes the White House the idea that certain federal bands of spectrum could be shared in order to provide more airwaves for broadband will likely fall by the wayside. As Levin said a few weeks back onstage at a white spaces event, “Republicans don’t want to share spectrum.”

Network neutrality could hit the news again

The FCC formally passed rules governing how and when ISPs might discriminate against packets flowing over their pipes at the end of 2010. It took roughly a year for those rules to become a law and right now the agency is battling the legality of those regulations in court. If the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals says the FCC didn’t have the authority to impose net neutrality rules then a Republican-led FCC isn’t likely to push back with an appeal or try again with a new justification for why the FCC should ensure ISPs don’t block content on their pipes.

Feld also notes that when the FCC passed the original rules it said it would revisit the issue a few years later to see how network neutrality was affecting the industry. That, plus the actual enforcement of the rules if they are deemed okay by the courts, could be affected by who wins tomorrow. In general, Republicans are more skeptical of the need for network neutrality, although Kevin Martin, a Republican appointee, took action against Comcast when it was found to block P2P traffic on its network,

The death of copper

The final big issue for this next administration is the death of the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) — which you might know better as the copper land line. This issue has been simmering for years, but as AT&T and Verizon begin to publicly back away from their copper networks as they abandon DSL, it’s an issue that will finally come to the fore. AT&T has been meeting recently with commissioners to discuss the issue according to FCC filings.

The issue that the next FCC must face is what to require from companies offering LTE as a replacement for copper in rural areas and from cable companies and other ISPs providing all-IP communication in more urban settings. There are reliability and redundancy issues around how well such a system much handle a disaster (perhaps made more relevant after Sandy) as well as requirements that force current copper providers to service existing lines and circuits even if a competitor is using it to offer service.

There are issues here that will cross party lines and Congress is likely to get involved since rural states and Representatives aren’t going to be thrilled that their constituents will lose their copper networks. As far as what Democrats or Republicans require from this change, my hunch is Democrats will pay greater attention to the how rule changes affecting the PSTN affect competitors who use those networks, while both parties should push for some form of reliability and resiliency regulations, especially if we keep having impressive natural disasters that take out cellular networks and power.

So, head on out to the polls tomorrow, knowing that your vote not only could change the our taxation schemes and government spending, but also the future of our telecommunications networks.

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The question regarding how to build it has become increasingly important as Internet communications begin to supplant 20th Century methods of delivering voice and video, but it remains unanswered. When we developed the National Broadband Plan, we expressed our concern that the current social contracts governing communications would not create a critical mass of communities with world-leading bandwidth, without which the United States might lose its international leadership in developing the next generation of broadband applications.

The Google experiment.

Google, to its credit, stepped up and offered to build such a network, and a whopping 1,100 communities volunteered to host it. Google chose Kansas City and negotiated a deal in which the governments in that area agreed to numerous actions to improve the economics of the new deployment. Now, the search giant is building out a network that will provide Kansas City a strategic bandwidth advantage and giving its residents new options, involving both speed and price, which they did not have before.

To its credit, Time-Warner Cable, one of the two incumbent providers in Kansas City, responded in the marketplace, offering consumers higher speeds and ramping up its local staff. But now Time-Warner Cable and AT&T, the other incumbent, are responding with lawyers, petitioning the city to receive the same benefits accorded Google. This response could signal a start of a race to the bandwidth top. Or it might be the beginning a race to the bottom. So this is where things get interesting.

Get better or get out of the way.

While it is understandable that incumbent providers have not embraced the opportunity to create test-beds for world-leading connectivity, their reluctance should not slow down others who are willing to take that leap.

The only way American consumers are going to get the same level of connectivity that residents of Korea, Japan, Stockholm and other places around the world already enjoy is if we pursue local experimentation of next generation deployment solutions like Google has done in Kansas City, and others are beginning to test.

Just this week, for example, the State of Illinois, the University of Chicago, and Gigabit Squared, a private company, announced a multi-million-dollar partnership to bring new levels of connectivity to a number of Chicago communities. If our country wants to lead in the 21st Century Information economy, this is exactly the kind of effort we need to encourage.

While state and local law will control the exact response to the incumbents, Time-Warner and AT&T are, and remain, beneficiaries of arrangements that provided them preferred access to public property. Google wasn’t the first private communications company getting deals from the government. Those legacy arrangements enjoyed by incumbents like AT&T and Time Warner granted them monopolies in their respective markets, something Google will not receive.

How governments respond to the incumbents shapes the future

The current situation provides an opportunity to consider what response would actually best improve options for broadband consumers, using Kansas City as the test-bed. For example, one response would be to offer the incumbents the same deal but require the same obligations that they required from Google, such as higher speeds and free connections to public institutions. I suspect the incumbents would not agree to those terms but if they did, Kansas City would enjoy the benefits of the most competitive broadband market in the world.

There is no more monopoly advantage.

Another potential response would be to provide Time-Warner and AT&T what they want without requiring anything in return. This would create a precedent that raises the cost for other communities trying to catalyze an upgrade, and thus discourages local efforts to build the kind of networks that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski recently underscored that our country needs to be competitive. Even worse, providing such benefits without requiring any reciprocal obligations could put pressure on other communities to engage in a race to the bottom, in which local communities lose traditional benefits without gaining any better options.

It takes two to tango

The Google/Kansas City agreement only happened because the city believed the existing arrangements were not providing what it needed. In fairness to the incumbents, however, we have to recognize that the move to an all-IP world requires all levels of government to reconsider existing arrangements.

As we reconsider those arrangements, we should acknowledge that the current arithmetic of deployment does not justify an upgrade. The math, however, runs both ways. Today, private investments in a next generation network without Kansas City-like agreements are unlikely, but it’s unrealistic and unfair to ask communities to offer such terms unless a private party is willing to make a Google-like investment. We need two to tango in order to drive the next generation of upgrades.

And therein lies the opportunity. The best outcome for the country would be if Time-Warner, AT&T and others seized this moment to offer to deploy the kind of network Google deployed in other communities if those communities would provide the kind of inducements Kansas City offered. If they did so, they would find willing partners. And those partnerships would spark a race to the top that would catalyze new investments, new economic growth, and a new generation of American leadership in delivering the benefits of broadband.

Blair Levin became a communications & sciety fellow with the Aspen Institute after serving as Executive Director of the National Broadband Planning effort. He is currently Executive Director of Gig.U, a project within the Institute that seeks to accelerate the deployment of next generation networks and services by using university communities as test-beds.

Chicago image courtesy of Flickr user Bert Kaufmann

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Incumbents can’t continue deflecting demands to deliver better broadband with weak excuses (though they don’t give up trying). Now communities newly motivated by all the publicity can say, “we want a gig like Kansas City. If you won’t do it, we’ll get it done ourselves.”

Some communities may partner with local providers such as Sonic.net in California and CityLink Telecommunications in New Mexico that have built networks and offer sub-$100 per month gig service. Others may find alternative sources of funding and build their own networks. Bottom line: Google provides inspiration and validation while communities move to replicate the magic.

Google’s free service is better than current low-income offerings

The second big bang is how Google tackles the digital divide with a free service. Communities likely will lean towards efforts similar to Google over those such as Comcast’s $10/month Internet Essentials service,  Google offers a 5/1 Mbps service package that beats Essentials’ 3 Mbps download and 756K upload speeds, and without the myriad of painful eligibility requirements that seem more exclusionary than inclusive. Low-income households just pay the $300 installation fee (there’s a $25/month payment plan option) and can get this package free for seven years.

The speeds offered are more than just a lifeline, but are actually viable for supporting home-based businesses, enabling better access to adult and youth education resources, and giving people a better chance at keeping pace with digital developments. In a year or so communities should see models for inclusion programs coming from Kansas City that they can replicate.

Do not underestimate the power of gigabit envy to drive community projects. Chattanooga, Tenn. is a marketing powerhouse, frequently in the news with stories of innovations and too-cool-for-school application development. Expect Kansas City to create a similar national buzz as the hip gig city. The pressure on local officials to get a gig, from the big cities down to the Mayberry RFDs, will be difficult to ignore.

Smart homes and gigabit speeds generate gigabit envy

Building TV boxes with Wi-Fi capabilities should accelerate the “smart home” concept, and bring gigabit envy to doorsteps across America. Fiber to Kansas City homes facilitates all types of powerful apps to monitor and manage energy usage, appliances, medical device, etc. Wi-Fi gives these apps legs by making the technology personal and pervasive. Desire to keep up with the digital Jones’ can contribute to network financial sustainability as people sign onto the network.

Putting tablet PCs into subscribers hands disguised as the TV remote gives broadband stakeholders a powerful branding tool. In many households the remote is the center of the universe. If local Kansas City retail stores, eating establishments, credit unions, doctors’ offices, etc. strengthen their brand with residents using Web content, social networking and specialized apps delivered via these tablets, then this become an economic development template for other communities.

Research from cloud content management company Alfresco shows tablets increasingly are becoming the computing platform of choice for people who want to do work tasks at home. Whether or not Google intentionally tapped into this trend, tablet-as-remote should make these must-carry devices for many, something communities can leverage to turn subscribers into walking, talking billboards for the network.

Getting people involved in selling strengthens local bonds

Google could easily establish in Kansas City the blueprint for broadband adoption that other communities emulate. They have set up demo sites in Kansas City so people can experience gigabit connectivity, and is doing six weeks of community rallies, creating Web order pages to preregister subscribers and turning residents into active marketers for the network.

This I-am-my-neighbor’s-keeper “fiberhood” program Google launched to identify people with a need for speed is producing early results and appears to be a formula for success. National Broadband Plan architect Blair Levin believes “Google is doing a very good job in this regard.” Whether they create co-ops, structure public private partnerships or have local governments run the network, communities must effectively target demand (a.k.a. demand aggregation).

It is financially prudent to pursue people with a need they are willing to pay someone to meet rather than build a network and hope you generate enough sales. Google established set percentages of residents in various neighborhoods who must pony up a $10 pre-registration fee before starting to build in those neighborhoods. “Not only will they better aggregate demand,” continues Levin, “they will reduce deployment costs by sending trucks to build out entire neighborhoods rather than sending a truck for each residential install.

The Co-Chairs of the Mayor’s Bi-State Innovations Team, Michael Burke and Ray Daniels, in an interview last week revealed a few behind the scenes details that provide additional lessons community broadband stakeholders can incorporate into their plans. A key takeaway is that communities should use Google’s efforts as a catalyst for planing. “Before Google had laid one foot of fiber,” Burke stated, “we started important planning and discussions that communities everywhere need to do.” Without this, the two Kansas Cities wouldn’t be in a good position to capitalize on its relationship with Google.

Craig Settles is a consultant who helps organizations develop broadband strategies, host of radio talk show Gigabit Nation and a broadband industry analyst. Follow him on Twitter (@cjsettles) or via his blog.

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To be clear, community ownership and local government ownership do not have to be one and the same. But using Google Fiber’s planned gigabit fiber-to-the-home network in Kansas City as an example, corporate ownership of a network means community interests may not always win out.

Connecting for Good, a Kansas City local nonprofit, and the Rosedale Development Association teamed up to propose the idea of a Wi-Fi co-op that would tap into Google Fiber to provide Internet connectivity for Rosedale, a low-income community. Rosedale has no library or central community center that might otherwise act as a broadband hub.

The issue isn’t about the merits of the co-op since it’s actually just a concept for now. It’s not about the fact that Google pretty much slammed the door on the idea before the group could even develop a specific proposal (that’s a separate discussion). What’s really at issue here is that if communities are not holding the driving wheel and they don’t own or at least rent the vehicle, they are ultimately a passenger in someone else’s ride. At some point, the needs of the network owner could trump the needs of the community.

Communities that do not have the financial resources, legal latitude or political will for local government or the public utility to own the network must rely on alternative sources to fund and/or run the network. With those alternatives come trade offs – how much control does a community have over the business of using broadband to transform communities versus how much control the entity has that brings cash, management and maybe ownership of the infrastructure.

Blair Levin, National Broadband Plan architect and driving force behind Gig.U, responding via Twitter to an article about control versus capital states “there is definitely a tension that happens between communities and partners that needs to be addressed.” John Brown, CEO of CityLink Telecommunications told Gigabit Nation this week that communities have to do a great job crafting the deals they strike with private sector companies if broadband is to deliver the benefits communities expect.

Fort Wayne, Ind. entered into a public private partnership with Verizon to bring fiber connectivity to residents. However, Verizon sold its FIOS assets to Frontier.  Frontier promptly raised rates 46 percent on subscribers’ TV services and introduced $500 installation charges, effectively neutering fiber’s progress there. Gary Evans, CEO of Hiawatha Broadband Communications, which partners with several municipal governments, believes that strong legal contracts can protect communities in this kind of scenario.

Private companies provide only some of the challenges. Recently, President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order directing relevant agencies to lay conduit in the ground anytime transportation or other public works programs result in digging up the ground. It further directs agencies to work with state governments to help them streamline right of way and other rules to support his “Dig Once” mandate. An automatic win for cities and counties? No.

Communities have to own this process as well, actively inserting themselves into negotiations, rule-making and program implementations. Otherwise, the Feds and the statehouse can create procedures beneficial to them, but not so much for local communities. For example, Brown says, “Mayors should take the lead in putting rules in place that mandate public works projects be publicized and all interested parties be given 90 days to respond with their intent to lay conduit and fiber with open access clearly a requirement.”

The bottom line is, every community that accepts money, materials and support from within or outside of the community need to deal upfront with the tradeoffs between capital and control of the process – the business of broadband. Understand that acceptance has a price. Manage that cost, your constituents’ expectations and your broadband plans accordingly.

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The plan is to launch roughly six pilot projects by the first quarter of next year. The resulting networks would use the Super Wi-Fi technology to create wireless networks that serve about a 10-kilometer radius and deliver roughly 10 Mbps of capacity per channel. The network would consist of a base station or a series of base stations hooked into some kind of backhaul network. In rural areas that’s likely to be DSL or maybe microwave.

Participants on a conference call announcing the partnerships didn’t disclose a budget, but the effort is noteworthy because it could drive demand for Super Wi-Fi equipment and chips, which would help lower the cost of such gear into price ranges that make the technology accessible for other users. If adopted widely the project also stakes a claim to those airwaves, which the FCC intends to auction off to the likes of cellular carriers.

From white spaces to Super Wi-Fi

Super Wi-Fi, which was formerly called white spaces broadband, takes advantage of the spectrum given up when broadcasters moved from analog to digital signals. The idea of using those airwaves for broadband generated a lot of protest among makers and users of wireless microphones and the nearby television stations who worried that interference from broadband users would disrupt their concerts or interrupt their TV shows. Those debates are settled, but then the spectrum crunch hit.

Suddenly those airwaves looked like fair game for delivering wireless broadband and ensuring people’s iPhones worked well. Thus, Congress and the FCC are prepping some of this unlicensed spectrum (unlicensed means anyone can use it as long as they pass FCC-set interference tests) for an incentive auction to deliver more licensed broadband for carriers. This will generate revenue for the government and help assuage the carriers’ constant cry for spectrum.

But it does put the use of such airwaves for unlicensed Super Wi-Fi on questionable ground. Blair Levin, the executive director of the Gig.U project, responded to questions regarding potential outcomes if the FCC decides to auction that spectrum by claiming that carriers don’t need or want rural spectrum, so building out rural Super Wi-Fi networks is okay. Maybe he is right, although I’ve never met a carrier who didn’t want to warehouse all the spectrum it could or force more unlicensed spectrum into the licensed arena.

So what will Super Wi-Fi allow?

But, should this effort get off the ground, there are other considerations, such as the need for backhaul networks to rural America. Most of these are DSL-based, which means providers of these networks will have to pay for an expensive backhaul, but also that the backhaul network won’t have the necessary capacity to deliver top speeds. Hopefully efforts to connect rural libraries through the 2009 ARRA funds for broadband networks might help build connections, but it’s unclear right now where the connectivity to feed the wireless network will come from.

These networks can provide roughly 22 Mbps per channel (each channel is a former TV channel and has 6 MHz of spectrum) and the idea is to use as many channels as needed to offer fast service. So in Maine there are 26 channels available, while in others areas there may be less. Actual speeds will be less than the theoretical speeds set by the standard. Jim Carlson, the CEO of Carlson Wireless, a company that makes radios and consumer equipment for Super Wi-Fi networks, says he’s working on a radio slated for next year that could approach 100 Mbps over the air with a one-way throughput around 64 Mbps. That’s awesome, but does mean that rural areas will need to beef up their backhaul.

And finally there’s the economic sustainability of these networks. The technology’s range is roughly 6.5 miles, and the challenge will be getting enough people to buy a service that pays for the maintenance and construction of the base station and for the backhaul. In rural areas finding a large enough cluster of people willing to pay for white spaces broadband in a 6.5-mile radius might prove difficult, especially when one considers that the range could be diminished by water, topography and buildings.

However, much like Gig.U, which has made some promising announcements and now has to get to work building out real networks, this partnership is a good start that I hope makes it to fruition.

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Thanks for your response.

We’re making progress, but our discussion still has the problem of getting to a common agreement on what problem we are trying to solve. The National Broadband Plan team was trying to solve many problems (as directed by Congress) but the first problem, as explicitly stated by Congress, was ensuring “that all people of the United States have access to broadband capability.”

To do that, one has to define what level of broadband capability government should be willing to subsidize, how much it will cost and how the government will pay for it. So it’s difficult for me to take seriously any criticism of the plan that doesn’t provide concrete answers to those questions.

Mr. Settles doesn’t provide those answers, though in his latest discourse, he appears to be more willing to accept the 4 Mbps speed target for the subsidy for residential, as long as the plan allows for that goal to be reconsidered, which it does. If I’m reading Mr. Settles right, then perhaps on that issue, we don’t disagree, though if so, it undercuts his earlier attacks on the plan.

If I’m reading him wrong, then once he answers those three questions we can have a far more productive dialogue. Simply saying that there are a lot of cost models is true, but if one is going to say he has a better plan, then one should be willing to advocate a reliable cost model for it. Further, Mr Settles says he wants more than 4Mbps in the next 10 years but he continues to avoid ever addressing how he would pay for it. We writing the plan didn’t have that luxury.

As to changing Universal Service to have it be more of a grant program to local communities, that’s an intriguing idea, one that as a former municipal lawyer, I personally have some sympathy for. My experience, however, with Universal Service, as well as the implementation of the 1996 Act, reminds me that implementation details can spell the difference between where good ideas succeed and where they don’t. Without knowing the details of Mr. Settles’ proposal, it’s hard to comment, but based on what he has written so far, I stand by our recommendations as the best plan I’ve yet seen that would accomplish the congressional objective.

In any event, as the FCC will be considering a very significant reworking of Universal Service early next year, I would urge Mr. Settles to engage in that debate. I should note Mr. Settles failed to answer the question of whether he thinks we should continue to fund multiple competitive wireless voice providers in an area. The team believed there were higher priorities — such as getting broadband to unserved areas — but Mr. Settles can disagree as long as he’s clear about where funds for unserved areas will come from.

I admit to some amusement that Mr. Settles was “ecstatic” at the plan’s recommendation that state laws not impede municipal deployment efforts. When the plan came out, everyone had a choice of whether to focus on the recommendations they liked or the ones they didn’t like. In my view, the more sophisticated and serious players in the process understood that getting things done is much harder than stopping things, and therefore, it made sense to push the positive aspects of the agenda. For example, when the plan was released, there was significant early praise on such issues as spectrum, Universal Service and Rights of Way reform. Curiously, several municipal advocates choose to focus on the merits or demerits of aspirational goals (such as the 100 Mbps to 100 million homes) rather than use the release of the plan to build support for the municipal recommendation. As a result, not surprisingly, there has been some progress on those other issues, but not on the municipal issue. With respect, I think that was an unfortunate tactical mistake by Mr. Settles and others who I know care deeply about the issue.

On wireless, Mr. Settles continues the attack something we did not say: that wireless will replace wired for business connectivity. Our point was  our country needs both a robust wired and wireless ecosystem, and that business, like consumers, will increasingly rely on mobile functionalities. Mr. Settles, and rural, wired phone companies, don’t like us pointing that out. I understand why the wired companies prefer us not to mention it, but I’m confused by Mr. Settles’ comments. It is not a matter of policy preference; it’s a simple fact of where the market is going, and it led the team to focus on the critical need for spectrum reform, which we saw as critical.

The major difference appears to be that Mr. Settles wants to focus on improving connectivity for business users. We continue to have a factual disagreement on the current service level to business. We publicized our initial findings in September and November of 2009, and adjusted as new data came in. We also published an extensive appendix with our data on these issues. If Mr. Settles think our data is wrong, it would be good to have a data-driven critique.

I’m not sure we have a disagreement on what should be done about it, as Mr. Settles hasn’t been clear on how he’s proposing to meet the need he suggests exists. Is he suggesting government funding new networks, or regulating current providers to assure certain speeds and price points?

Rather than speculate on what the proposals are in this forum, perhaps GigaOM would sponsor a live webcast of myself and Mr. Settles discussing the issues. I’m quite sincere in believing that the plan is a living document that should be improved, but also quite adamant that critics owe the team that produced it a level of seriousness and detail similar to that which that team devoted to the effort.

Blair Levin, served as FCC Chief of Staff from 1993-1997, and returned to the FCC in 2009 to lead the team that wrote the National Broadband Plan. He is currently a fellow in the Communications and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.

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Mr. Settles first critiques the plan’s proposal to set the minimal level of broadband speed to be subsidized through the Universal Service Fund. He notes that I asked any critic to answer three questions: What is the minimum speed to be subsidized; how much will it cost; and how will we pay for it? He doesn’t answer any of these questions.

To the first, he says it’s a “trick question,” as the goal isn’t speed. We agree speed isn’t the ultimate goal, as he notes later. But it is an essential, rather than a trick, question. If the federal government is going to subsidize networks in areas where market forces won’t do the trick, then the government has to establish a technical standard for what is being subsidized. Mr. Settles refusing to answer the question of what that standard should be suggests he doesn’t understand that without such a standard, the government could end up subsidizing narrowband speeds, an outcome I’m sure he would not favor.

To the second question  – What would it cost? — he says, “one hellava a lot.” That answer might work for Mr. Settles’ work. I think, however, Congress and the American people deserve a more meaningful answer. For people interested in how the plan provided specific answers for a variety of scenarios, I would refer them to the 137-page technical appendix to the plan found here.

To the third question, he suggests we look at the model demonstrating how three communities found ways to build gigabit networks without federal dollars. If he means we as a country should let municipalities do the job, then it’s illogical to criticize the federal government for not providing enough support. Further, it’s odd he ignored Recommendation 8.19 in the plan that proposes Congress overturn state laws that prohibit such municipal efforts. If he’s arguing municipalities should have the power to meet their citizens’ needs as they see them, then we agree. I wish more attention were paid to that recommendation, as some municipal efforts are quite promising, and as a matter of principle, laws restricting deployment by any party are unwise.

But if, as he seems to suggest in other parts of his critique, we should use universal service to fund higher speeds to residential areas, then we do have an important disagreement. We proposed a plan that would result in everyone having access to networks at speeds (4Mbps actual down/1Mbps actual up) higher than the average user uses today and fund it through reprioritizing existing universal service funds. Mr. Settles appears to suggest we need to subsidize speeds of 100Mbps everywhere. (If I’ve misinterpreted him, I apologize and hope he will clarify.) That would cost over $300 billion in new money, and if collected through the current system, would add an additional $30 a month to every subscriber’s bill, causing broadband to become unaffordable to tens of millions of current subscribers. Surely, we don’t want to adopt a policy that results in a massive drop-off of broadband use, yet that would be the consequence of adopting Mr. Settles’ proposal. Further, we saw no evidence that the incremental benefits of increasing speeds from 4Mbps to 100Mbps for homes that don’t enjoy access to such networks is anywhere remotely close to the incremental cost of $300 billion.

Mr. Settles then goes on to suggest that 4Mbps is too low because it won’t be enough for business purposes. He’s right, but he ignores that the plan’s 4Mbps target is for homes, not businesses. The data we collected suggested that businesses today in most of America have no problem getting access to the speeds they need. (For a full discussion of the data, see the report noted above.) We were concerned about the future, which is why we proposed, as one of the six goals, a gigabit connection to an anchor institution in every community, and developed some ideas — such as eliminating rules that prohibit anchor institutions from sharing networks — to advance that goal. Mr. Settles ignored this goal — which is designed to assure business class connectivity to every community — and the policy proposals, and instead, implies that the plan recommended wireless will serve all businesses’ needs. That simply isn’t accurate.

Mr. Settles questions whether the research we did was “hands-on.” It consisted of, among other things, 36 public workshops involving over 10,000 people, 31 public notices generating over 23,000 comments and nine public hearings. We made presentations in eight public Commission meetings so everyone would know what we thought the facts were, where we saw the gaps and what we thought the solutions were.

Mr. Settles also challenges some personal statements I’ve made, as is his right. He disagrees with my prediction that “4G is going to end up being more important to more people over the next couple of years than increases in wireline speed.” I made that prediction based on a number of market trends, such as growth in smart phone purchases, use of mobile applications, investment trends in networks and consumer surveys. His response, which is,“for a great many places, broadband speeds are not pretty good” is both contrary to the prevailing data we saw and not relevant to the question of where the upside for consumers is in the next several years. I would be happy to engage in a wager as to the primary way consumers access the Internet five years from now, and will put my money on wireless.

He also challenges a statement I made as to why we didn’t recommend a new unbundling regime by saying we must protect against monopolistic behavior. While I agree we need such protections, I was responding to a specific proposal we believed would have stifled investment and competition. If he believes we should have adopted an unbundling regime, he should be clear about it, but also clear about the details of such a regime, such as what the wholesale discount rate should be.

In addition, he takes a comment I made about shifting funds from subsidizing numerous wireless carriers in a market (in some areas, the government subsidizes more than a dozen wireless companies) to instead focus the funds on areas without any broadband providers as evidence I don’t want competition. I’m not opposed to competition, but think that subsidizing construction of a 4Mbps-capable network where there is currently no broadband provider is a higher priority than subsidizing a dozen voice competitors where the market already provides multiple consumer options.

His comment is particularly surprising, as I’ve read other comments from him in which he criticizes wasteful Universal Service Fund spending. I would have thought he would agree that spending public money to subsidize multiple competitors should not be our highest priority.

We do agree on two important areas. First, we agree broadband is a critical economic development tool. There are a number of recommendations in the plan that relate to that understanding, as well as a specific chapter (Chapter 13) that details a number of proposals for improving how we can use broadband to drive economic development. In addition, I recently published a paper for the Knight Commission which called for creating a universal service fund to run a competition for local governments to come up with demonstration projects for utilizing broadband for economic development. (It can be found on pages 27-28.)

I also profoundly agree with the spirit of Mr. Settles’ headline: “Some Assembly Still Required.” The best line in the plan is the beginning of the final chapter, on implementation: “This plan is in beta and always will be.”

While I’m very proud of the work the team did to produce the plan and believe its recommendations lead us in the right direction on many fronts, I’m certain it’s far from perfect and hope that as it’s implemented, it’s constantly improved.  For that to happen, critics will have to answer the same questions we struggled with, formulate specific policies based on hard data, and acknowledge the hard trade-offs necessary to move our country forward. Mr. Settles has a distinguished career writing about community broadband, but his critique of the National Broadband Plan doesn’t rise to the standard he has previously met, nor the standard we need to improve on the plan.

Blair Levin, served as FCC Chief of Staff from 1993-1997, and returned to the FCC in 2009 to lead the team that wrote the National Broadband Plan. He is currently a fellow in the Communications and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.

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Today the FCC is releasing a Public Notice, or PN, on the best way to define broadband. As the Public Notice points out, much of the recent debate tends to center on throughput speeds. Engineers know that these numbers by themselves are most often misleading. For example, in most cases the “advertised” throughput speed has a tenuous relation with the actually delivered speed, which will actually vary over time, depending on the application, the server, and many other factors.

Defining broadband is an important effort (so is mapping out where broadband is), but consumers are likely to be disappointed by the National Broadband Plan, because the divide between what the American people want and how the government works means a lot of their desires will fall into the chasm between. That divide is becoming increasingly clear. Last month, Blair Levin, a former FCC staffer and the head of the National Broadband Plan task force, expressed frustration at the quality of suggestions he was getting from consumers with regard to ways to improve broadband service. He said they exhibited “sloppiness” and a “lack of seriousness and purpose.”

A Google effort to generate public comments on the state of the nation’s broadband resulted in the following top suggestions: “Remove the monopolies held by cable companies.” and “Make Broadband a Utility. Internet is like phone service, water service, or electricity. It is quickly becoming almost necessary to have it. Since Internet itself is a service, it should become a Utility with no filtering.” But while they raise some valid points, the FCC needs more to work with. The top-ranked suggestion on the list came from Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel, who wrote: “Install broadband fiber as part of every federally-funded infrastructure project. Most of the cost of deployment is due to tearing up/repaving roads. Laying fiber during public works projects already underway would dramatically reduce costs.”

That’s the type of concrete policy decision that the FCC can take and evaluate. Though in addition to deciding whether putting fiber into road projects would help bring broadband to where it’s needed, the FCC would also have to consider who would get access to that fiber and what sort of rules they’d have to follow, since government dollars bought it. Already the large carriers are reluctant to take government handouts under the stimulus package for broadband, in part because they don’t want to deal with any of the federal strings that might be attached.

These are just a few examples to show how the hope of getting 100 Mbps two-way fiber connections to every home could somehow morph into a policy that delivers a minimum of 768 kbps to rural areas with no access. Just like in business, a plan is good but the execution is key. At least in a corporation everyone is theoretically fighting for the same goal. With politics, folks responsible for the execution don’t necessarily even agree on the plan.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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