Bringing Home the Bits: A Consideration of Broadband Deployment in the US

About

There are many perspectives on the state of broadband deployment – is it a success, a failure, a hotbed for a new generation of monopolist, a societal imperative, or a product that has not yet proved it value to the consumer? Can it be all of the above?

In late 2001, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the US National Academies released a report on residential broadband, with a number of conclusions for regulators and other government players. It observed that the US approach to regulation of telecommunications was producing a pattern of deployment in which the shape of the market and the technology varied from town to town, so that a single national approach to planning and policy would be hard to craft.

This talk will discuss some of the conclusions from that report, and the framework that the report used in making its recommendations, and will as well provide a current perspective on what is happening in the United Sates, including emerging technical and business alternatives. Broadband deployment may be a patchwork, but a healthier patchwork than some might think.

The organisers wish to thank the following sponsors for their support of this lecture as part of the Broadband Divides Policy Forum: Advantage West Midlands, Cambridge-MIT Institute, Cisco, Oracle, South East England Development Agency (SEEDA). This lecture is a public event that opens the Broadband Divides Policy Forum, organised by The Oxford Internet Institute in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts and Syracuse Universities: Program on Internet and Telecommunications Convergence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Syracuse University.