6
???????????????????????
| 6 | Industry Voices — Lowenstein: Avoiding another multi-billion-dollar broadband boondoggle | ----------- | |
| FierceWireless: Wireless | 2020-05-30 06:00 | ????0? | |
| We’ve been at this problem in earnest for about 10 years now. In March 2010, to much fanfare, President Obama released Connect America: The National Broadband Plan. The goal was to connect 100 million households with 100 Mbps internet service by 2020. This objective has been partially realized. Most households with access to cable DOCSIS service or fiber (Verizon Fios) are able to get that sort of speed today. Broadband for the ‘haves’ has improved markedly over the past five years, helping to power all that streaming and Zooming.First, the counting thing. It doesn’t help the government when, as has been widely reported in recent weeks, we still don’t have a good handle on just how many households can’t get broadband. So the range is now 20 million to 40 million Americans. That’s an unforgivable margin for error. If we’d been intelligent about this, it could have been one question on the 2020 Census: “Do you have access to a broadband service of at least 50 Mbps?” But we do need a proper count. I suspect it will be easy to measure the 80% of households who are un/underserved. As with so many things, the last 20% will be tougher to gauge.The significant increase in network capacity should also make the incumbent mobile operators more amenable to using the cellular network as an alternative to fixed broadband -- if not through FWA then through data plans that allow the service to be a defacto broadband substitute. A $40 per month plan offering 50-100 Mbps with some form of data cap, such as 200-300 GB per month, could be quite doable on a larger scale with all the capacity coming online. One could certainly see this as an opportunity for Dish once it builds its network, either sold directly or through wholesale relationships. Perhaps more households will ultimately have one broadband service that combines fixed and mobile. It would be the 2020`s version of cutting the landline for cellular only, as so many households have done. If you look at the universe at broadband underserved/unserved households, I think it’s a reasonable estimate that at least 50% of them could be affordably reached by FWA. The other 50% will require some combination of solutions, accounting for some new/improved technologies over the next few years. We can count on some improvements to satellite service and perhaps one of the new satellite ventures actually making it. And you also have tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft throwing megadollars at the problem. Let’s assume something comes out of this! With the types of stimulus dollars being tossed around and contemplated, you’d be surprised at what can be done for relatively modest dollars, comparatively. $10 billion per year could be used to give 20 million households $500 toward their bills. What if we were to come up with something creative to realize $10 billion: ⅓ from the federal government stimulus, ⅓ from spectrum auction proceeds, and ⅓ from industry -- fixed/mobile service providers, cable companies, and the Netflixes of the world that ride on these broadband networks. Some of this could even be used to help the cable companies improve and extend their internet essentials-type services. -- ???????? | |||
|
????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????? |
|||
????????????