ACCESS to a fast Internet connection has become more than a convenience. It’s being enshrined in some countries as a legal right of all citizens. Finland, for example, announced last week that it was moving up its timetable to next year from 2015 for guaranteeing broadband access to all, according to YLE, the Finnish broadcasting company.
Photo Illustration by The New York Times
Congress is clearly irritated that the United States has not done well in the international broadband Olympics. Other countries have national plans to accelerate the diffusion of broadband; America does not. So Congress has given theFederal Communications Commission a mandate to produce a plan with specific recommendations by next February.
We shouldn’t get caught up, however, in a space-race panic. We’ve actually done surprisingly well making a broadband connection accessible to a vast majority of American households. No less than 96 percent of households either subscribe to or have access to broadband service, according to an F.C.C. task force, which presented a status report to the commission last month.
The report does not play up the fact that almost all homes have, or could have, broadband service.
Nor does it highlight the actual median speed of 3 megabits a second among households that now have broadband, (which is based on data that probably understates the speeds substantially). The authors seem happily caught up in the thrill of playing an international game of catch-up.
The most interesting question here is the one that the F.C.C. can’t answer: Why have 33 percent of American households that have access to broadband elected not to subscribe? The reasons “are not well understood,” the report says. A survey focusing on the nonadopters is under way.
We do know that adoption levels vary by age, income, education and race. Perhaps the F.C.C.’s survey of nonadopters will show that low income is the main barrier to access. In that case, means-tested subsidies could remove that obstacle.
But age is clearly another factor. Survey data supplied by the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that just 30 percent of Americans who are 65 or older use broadband, compared with 77 percent of the 18-to-29 age group. (Which raises an interesting question itself: only 77 percent?)
The F.C.C.’s own survey of nonadopters is likely to confirm that many older people are simply not as comfortable with newer technology. But it may also reveal that there is an irreducible core of people, spanning ages and income levels, who simply do not want to use the Internet.
And maybe that won’t change, no matter how many social workers knock at their doors, and no matter how many years pass after Internet service has come to be accepted by their neighbors as a utility as essential as water and electricity. South Korea’s experience as a broadband pioneer is suggestive. The task force looked at 22 countries with broadband plans, seeking best practices that were well suited to the United States, and South Korea’s broadband initiative was of particular interest.
In 1999, South Korea began to help low-income and elderly households get PCs and become connected, and the outcome could be described as quite successful: “Today, 83 percent of households in Korea have adopted broadband access,” the report says. But one can also look at the remaining 17 percent and wonder what has prevented those households from getting online, despite the strenuous efforts of a government that has been a world leader in the broadband race.
The F.C.C. has invited comments and suggestions for its broadband initiative and has received about 41,000 pages in response, from individuals and businesses. Googleproposes that every American have access by 2012 to a connections of 5 megabits a second (Mbps) — in both directions. It also suggests that several cities be selected to test the installation in every household of 1-gigabit-a-second connections — or more than a thousand times faster than the speed that the F.C.C. uses to define downstream “broadband.”
What exactly one could do with such a gloriously fast connection is not detailed. Then again, even the recent F.C.C. report, which does its best to list exciting possibilities that come into view with each increment of broadband speed, struggles to come up with many examples beyond 5 Mbps. Streamed classroom lectures, for example, require 1 to 5 Mbps; with 10 Mbps, the lectures come in high definition.
The estimated costs for universally upgrading the minimum speed of the nation’s broadband connections to 3 Mbps would be about $20 billion, according to the report. Getting to 10 Mbps would be $50 billion. To play in the same league as Finland, with its 100 Mbps service promised to every citizen by 2015, would require $350 billion.
FINLAND occupies a compact 130,558 square miles, versus more than 3.5 million for the United States. The economics of broadband deployment are greatly affected by physical distances. With some understatement, the F.C.C. report says, “the economics of providing broadband to the rural U.S. are challenging.”
In a news release introducing the task force report, the F.C.C. calls broadband “the infrastructure challenge of our time,” which seems a wee bit overstated, given the decrepit state of our bridges, highways, railroads and schools. It also blithely overlooks the fact that the infrastructure is already in place to provide speeds of 3 to 10 Mbps to 94 percent of American households.
We’ve built it, but not all have come. Some may never come.
Let’s not assume that their and their nation’s future will be hopelessly blighted if they don’t.
By RANDALL STROSS
Found by Roger Stix, Atlanta Business Video
Posts
