FCC Gets Down To Brass Tacks On Fiber

Yesterday the FCC featured what I found to be the most interesting, insightful, and in-depth broadband workshop yet on the topic of advanced fiber architectures. Organized and moderated by David Isenberg, this wide-ranging discussion brought up a number of excellent points worth reiterating. You can watch video of the workshop here. Here's a sampling paraphrased, grouped by speaker, and commented on:

David Lynch, Verizon CTO
- Every six years there's a ten times increase in bandwidth usage.
(This aligns well with my proposal for logarithmic bandwidth goals of 1Mbps, 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1Gbps, etc.)

- The FCC can't find me enough spectrum to make up for the capacity of fiber.
(In other words, we'll never live in a world without wires. Instead what we want is a world where wireless can live up to its full potential because of the universal availability of fiber backhaul.)

- FiOS customers average three to four times greater bandwidth usage than DSL customers.
(Morale of this story: users will fill whatever pipe is given to them. In other words supply drives demand.)

- Every wireless carrier has a vision to get fiber backhaul to all wireless towers.
(What was even more interesting was his suggestion that 40% of Verizon's wireless towers already have fiber, and that he thought the percentage industrywide was likely similar. That's more than the 20% estimates I'd heard before, but still shows there's a long way to go.)

Joanne Hovis, Columbia Telecommunications Corporation
- In Montgomery County schools connected to a community-owned fiber network are getting access to 100Mbps speeds and paying $71 per Mbps per month, whereas neighboring schools not on the network are paying $2,000 a month for T1 service at 1.54Mbps, and that price is subsidized by matching e-rate funds of an additional $2,000 a month.
(Put another way, schools on T1s are paying over $2,500 per Mbps per month. That's not sustainable or acceptable.)

Tim Nulty, ECFiber
- Rural networks are better if owned by non-profit-maximizing entities.
(I've been seeing a similar pattern elsewhere. When a rural community gets fiber it's inevitably done by non-profit or low-profit means. In rural communities where the only service providers are profit-maximizing their service is lagging as it doesn't make sense for multi-state carriers to invest money in less profitable areas. Rural broadband can work, but only if the solution is focused primarily on serving community needs and not on maximizing profit.)

- Open access is better for rural America because it allows for competition.
(This is an important point. Facilities-based competition might work in markets that already have multiple networks or that can support the deployment of multiple networks. Rural areas are lucky to have one network, and often aren't big enough to support the deployment of new networks. So if you want rural America to realize the benefits of competition, then you have to be encouraging open access networks.)

- With USF, we could build fiber to all of rural America in the next three years.
(While a bold statement and a monumental challenge to tackle if given the opportunity, there's definite truth in what Tim says. As I've been saying repeatedly, if we could reallocate the $7 billion a year in USF funding to a loan or loan guarantee program, we could free up the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars needed to get the job done. And while there's still a lot of work to do, there are at least dozens of people the country ready to get to work deploying far and wide in rural America if sufficient funds were made available. So I hope as we get into USF reform we don't just consider incremental steps but instead look at this as an opportunity to take bold steps to insure rural America's future.)

Benoit Felton, Yankee Group analyst
- Once you've deployed the network the key is getting as many people onto it as possible.
(This runs counter to the notion of trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible from each individual customer. Instead the point is that once you've sunk the cost into building the network the key to success is how many people you can get using it. Then with that baseline you can work on increasing how much profit is driven from each user.)

- People aren't being offered different things to do on fiber yet.
(This is a really important issue for any who's a fiber advocate. We need to be encouraging more innovation in terms of what can be done with fiber. We need to be able to show why fiber matters, not just talk about it in the abstract.)

Herman Wagter, CityNet Amsterdam
- People are setting up home servers and opening up home-based businesses.
(This is a very interesting happening as it shows what can happen when you have lots of upload capacity and broadband connections that you can rely on. This is what the next generation of the Internet looks like, where we're no longer limited by the last-mile bottleneck.)

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Lots more interesting things were said at this event, and it left me quite hopeful that this dialog around the creation of a national broadband plan is moving past where these conversations have usually got hung up. This workshop pushed aside the veil of technology neutrality and pointed out the differences between technologies. And it facilitated a frank, civil discussion about the real solutions that are needed to improve our country's broadband future.

So color me optimistic as we head into a beautiful fall weekend!