As the pressure mounts on the FCC to come up with a policy that makes Net Neutrality advocates happy -- and will probably be overturned again by the courts -- it occurs to me that our shared spectrum summit known as Super Wi-Fi is probably pointing to the indicators that will tell the whole story about whether the new rules are working or not.
To me, the big issues come from the history of the public network. The public switched telephone network [PSTN] that served Plain Old Telephone Services [POTS] had Rate of Return guarantees associated with build-outs. In the ‘90s when the FCC was moving away from Rate of Return regulation, NJ Bell (now Verizon NJ) and the state commission worked out a fiber to the home strategy that took the incentives and associated them to their fiber build-out. Bruce Kushnick has been pointing out that the incentives that were given did not have their intended consequences, and he has been further pointing out that the data-friendly fiber network has always been part of the FCC’s jurisdiction.
Now we have a lot of converged issues, a history of subsidized build-outs, an indirect relationship to the incentives and achievements, and confusion as to whether data access and Internet access are synonymous.
In the late ‘90s when VoIP was considered a threat to the carriers, Ed Whitacre, the then-CEO of SBC, would advocate that if the goal was competition then the competitors should be building out their own infrastructure. In some ways that was supposed to be the BTOP (Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program) incentive strategy to get more data-friendly fiber networks out into the market. Unfortunately, like NJ Bell, much of the incentive ended up building out a better core network that supported the edge...Read More
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