Category Archives: access
Broadband adoption attracting serious research
At the end of the last post, I promised to pass along some info about two new research studies that dig further into a) digital have-nots; and b) the billions of dollars the US economy may be flushing away by ignoring broadband illiteracy.
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“Everybody don’t have coffee shops.”
A community worker and broadband researcher working with a young man in Philadelphia. A new report describes forcefully how much the urban poor are losing out by being digitally excluded. The authors describe the outcome as a “de facto non-adoption tax” on low-income Americans (photo: Amalia Deloney).
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These two studies are fascinating. In their very different ways, they provide detailed insights into the social costs of excluding large numbers of people from the broadband population. Broadband Adoption in Low-Income Communities, prepared by the Social Science Research Council and released this March, is qualitative, based on 170 in-depth interviews. The Economic Impact of Digital Exclusion takes a mostly quantitative and equally serious approach (the bib alone is 8 pages). It’s the work of a Philadelphia-based non-profit advocacy organization, Digital Inclusion Group (DIG), in collaboration with economic consultancy Econsult Corp.
Social injustice in the digital age
These studies don’t just offer new data. They re-frame some big ideas about broadband in two very important ways. Read the rest of this entry
Digital literacy: is it time?
Proficiency in the use of digital technologies
The FCC’s Broadband Plan is coming to Congress on March 16 and it’s already making a difference. It has us talking about broadband in an unaccustomed way. Not just can we get faster, cheaper broadband. Not just can we get it to everybody. No, the FCC team recognized early in the game that even the most generous supply-side solutions would never solve the problem of the missing one-third – the proportion of Americans without broadband, which is roughly the proportion of Canadians without broadband.
Wanna buy a nice black box that will change your life?
New research is getting to the bottom of some interesting demand-side issues – particularly about broadband holdouts. Survey researchers have developed good tests for gauging the technical skills of respondents while they’re being interviewed over the phone. But there has long been a puzzle as to how to treat responses like “I’m just not interested in broadband” – a puzzle shared by both researchers and policymakers. Read the rest of this entry
Google’s Gigabit Bonanza
Last week Google announced it will finance ultra high-speed residential Internet access over fiber in select US communities. North American broadband households get average downlink speeds of around 5 Mbit/s. No wonder this initiative has caused a lot of jaw-dropping, soul-searching and wild-assed speculation.
The announcement has gleaned very positive support from Washington’s advocacy community. Others have fretted about Google’s real motives, such as whether or not the company is planning to become a retail ISP. The incumbents and their fellow travellers have dissed the venture. For example:
“The Google plan is short on details, with no information on capital spending, and, in our view, should primarily be seen through the lens of regulatory posturing,” Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research report. “We do not view Google’s announcement as a serious threat to the broadband businesses of either the cable or telecom operators.”
Short on details? Jeez, the project just got announced. The details will come as part of the “experimental” process. Like, that’s the whole point. And the suggestion Google is engaging in “regulatory posturing” is a hoot coming from the carrier sub-culture, which pretty much invented regulatory posturing. Read the rest of this entry
Battle of the broadband studies (3)
If this is “affordable,” I’m giving up my citizenship.
The recent study entitled Lagging or Leading: the state of Canada’s broadband infrastructure was financed by Bell Canada, Bell Aliant, Cogeco, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw and TELUS. It says over and over that, once you root out the incompetent studies, Canada looks great, belying those over-simpified headlines about a “crisis” in the house. It returns often to how affordable broadband is in Canada:
“Canadians have access to some of the most affordable services, while also benefiting from some of the world’s fastest connection speeds for both wireline and wireless broadband services” (p.4).
Leave aside the sophistry in disconnecting affordability and speed (we have some of the former and also some of the latter; how about affordable and fast?). And let’s not quibble about USD PPP, weighted averages or whether anybody at the Berkman Center can run a decent regression analysis. Let’s just look at a few humdrum retail prices: what subscribers in France and Canada are actually paying today for broadband on its own and in bundles. Read the rest of this entry
Battle of the broadband studies (2)
Last week the Berkman Center for Internet and Society released their draft report on broadband for the FCC – Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world (links and info page here).
Open access is good policy
The new report puts the lie to Ottawa’s broadband myth-making based on selective use of data. It also condemns the CRTC for its coddling of the incumbents and mismanagement of the evolution to market-based competition. The policy focus of the study is the use by national regulators around the world of open access rules as the primary tool for creating competition in the residential broadband market:
“The idea was that the incumbents – the former Bell companies here [in the US], Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, British Telecom (BT) in the United Kingdom, and so forth – would be required by law to lease to newly entering competitors parts of their existing network on nondiscriminatory, regulated terms. This would lower the cost of entry and allow entrants to innovate in the electronics attached to the network, or in customer care systems or services they would offer, rather than investing in digging trenches and making holes in the walls of the houses of subscribers to pull their own, independent wiring” (p.81) Read the rest of this entry
Policy strategies for broadband: penetration vs quality
Thanks for your comments on my previous post, Elie. Some reactions follow.
First, let’s dispel any notion that getting us out of the broadband dark ages in Canada has one simple fix. You seem to suggest we need to choose between government investment in fiber and tougher ISP regulations. What we need is a combination of strategies that includes both public and private investment in infrastructure, especially but not exclusively in fiber.
We also need to re-regulate the Internet access market to prevent the broadband ISPs from engaging in undue preference and other discriminatory practices, smuggled in under the guise of network management practices. The ISPs will continue to fight off any such re-regulation if it favors network neutrality. (They’ve also recently invested in a consulting study that questions the claims Canada is a broadband laggard – from a list that includes the OECD, the ITIF, the ITU, Akamai and the Cisco BQS study. The author claims (p.87) that “these examples [of data from certain countries] demonstrate the dramatic differences that can occur when service speeds are measured using different methodologies.” That’s exactly the point. They all reach the same overall conclusion anyway: Canada is a broadband laggard, QED.) Read the rest of this entry
Living in a fool’s (broadband) paradise
Or how you gonna make ‘em love the Broadband Internet if they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?
Last week we were awash – again – in breaking news, official announcements, and new research concerning the Internet and broadband. ICANN and the US Dept of Commerce loosened the apron-strings that bound them together for 11 years. Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s new CEO, has transformed the Joint Project Agreement into an Affirmation of Commitments that will finally (he claims) give the rest of the planet a say.
The FCC held an open meeting devoted entirely to its interim report on the National Broadband Strategy. These guys aren’t fooling around. Check out this page – a conversation with Chairman Genachowski, video of the full meeting, slides, background papers, etc. The Chairman called this open meeting “an extraordinary, unprecedented process.”
The fine folks at the Saïd Business School and the Universidad de Oviedo, who brought us the world’s first comprehensive study of broadband quality (underwritten by Cisco), have just released their 2009 report (press release here, pdf of report here). The good news: 62 out of the 66 countries analyzed have improved the quality of consumer broadband services since last year. The bad news: Canada has dropped in the general ranking from 26th place to 30th. More bad news: the BQS study is based on 24 million measures, taken in 66 countries, of actual throughput, and scored using a weighting for downlink, uplink and latency, according to their importance for next-generation services like consumer telepresence. Huh? Bad news? Read the rest of this entry
The Future of New Media Cancon (2)
Here’s my hasty list of Top 10 new media Cancon issues, in no special order.
1 – Technology agnosticism. This was a good approach to policymaking under the Broadcasting Act. Not anymore, because the Internet has got absolutely nothing to do with broadcasting. You can twist that into a pretzel, but interactive, on-demand video, in a medium where personal messaging is still the most popular activity, isn’t broadcasting. That’s exactly what the Commission was telegraphing in its call for a national digital strategy: the old definitions don’t work.
2 – The mass media paradigm. We’ve always treated our cultural industries like mass media, because that’s what they are. But the Internet isn’t and public policy should take that as its starting point. This isn’t a value judgment, that’s just the way it is, based on what real people really do online. Read the rest of this entry
