Time to Invest in Telecom? Obama's New-New Deal for Broadband

In his weekly radio and YouTube (News - Alert) address for Saturday, December 6th, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama called for nationwide access to broadband networks, saying, “It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the change to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m president – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.”

 

Aside from connecting broadband “have-nots” to the Internet, the Illinois Democrat wants more schools, hospital and libraries to connect to the Internet too. As Obama said: “We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms, because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.”

 

“That is why the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives,” he continued. “We will make sure that every doctor’s office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.”

 

Obama may have been responding to the “Call to Action for a National Broadband Strategy” made by a coalition of 55 entities (AT&T, Verizon,Google (News - Alert), Free Press, the Benton Foundation, etc.) on the previous Tuesday. Certainly if the government is going be launching a multi-industry economic stimulus package – and technology infrastructure invest is part of this – the telecom industry can play on America’s woeful bandwidth penetration to receive a healthy infusion of cash in the name of achieving universal broadband access in America.

 

The group is calling for open access to the Internet “to the maximum feasible extent” for all users, service providers, content providers, and application providers; rights for network operators to manage their networks “responsibly, pursuant to clear and workable guidelines and standards”; a competitive Internet and broadband marketplace, to the greatest extent possible; and broadband network performance, capacity, and connections that U.S. citizens need to compete successfully in the global marketplace.

 

This “new New Deal” of Obama is a sort of cross between FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s mobilization of public and private interests to build the U.S. interstate highway system in the 1950s (of course, that was actually constructed so that military troops and tanks could quickly move across the country, but economically speaking, you get the idea).

 

Delivering massive broadband access to the Internet may be more of a challenge than most politicians expect. The top countries, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway, are small countries. So is South Korea, another high flier. It’s easy to link everyone up when your whole country is the size of New Jersey or New York. But America has sparsely populated regions. How much would it cost to bring universal access to Wyoming, for example? To truly bring back universal access we’ll have to resurrect — dare I say it? — the pre-divestiture world of AT&T (News - Alert).

 

I’m sure AT&T wouldn’t mind recreating their former mega-role on the world telecom stage. If nothing else, the boys at Bell Labs could start playing chess on the lunch tables again.