Broadband Bringing Home the Bits (2002) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Setting the Stage
1 Setting the Stage
Pages 43-61
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From page 43... ...
Years of assertions by technology gurus, business executives, and marketers about the potential promise of broadband have given way to a small but rapidly growing U.S. population who are using a first generation of broadband for faster Internet access from their homes.
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From page 44... ...
Widespread use marked by new patterns of information flow not only would benefit the individuals connected, but also could lead to qualitative changes in how people interact with family, community, and the workplace, with potentially profound social and economic implications. Broadband is viewed by some as a double-edged sword: networking could promote economic development, yet electronic commerce also has the potential to displace local businesses.
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From page 45... ...
(In the telephone network, these points generally are located at central offices, while in hybrid fiber coax cable systems, these points are known as head ends.) The link between the point of presence and the customer using either existing communications infrastructure or new facilities is frequently referred to as the "last mile," because it represents a bottleneck that constrains the benefits the consumer gets from the rest of a network, which is literally at some distance.
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From page 46... ...
Simply depending on private sector investment to fund broadband deployment does not reflect the complementary economic and social policy objectives that would justify the commitment of public resources to promote it. In terms of what is actually available at present, the public policy case for universal broadband is weak the "bet" is that public investment could help realize social objectives and stimulate demand and private-sector investment.
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From page 47... ...
Broadband deployment may stall at a speed that is an improvement over dial-up but which does not keep pace with what is needed, thus acting as a brake on the computer industry. Similarly, operators of other segments of the network (i.e., backbone Internet service providers [ISPs]
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From page 48... ...
Analog telephony has evolved to digital, with high-speed digital signal transmission commonplace throughout the public telephone network except in the last mile segment. Digital transmission over the last mile has been possible for many years with the addition of dial-up modems.
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From page 49... ...
Some proposed applications are data-centric, however, and may play a role complementary to the digital communications services discussed in this report. Since the 1980s, direct broadcast satellite has used satellite transmission to provide many channels of service over very wide areas, and this technology has been further developed to provide twoway broadband service delivery.
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From page 50... ...
State commissions also regulate intrastate long-distance service, and the FCC regulates local telephone companies insofar as they provide origination and termination services for long-distance calls. The division of responsibilities between state and federal regulators is determined by the Communications Act of 1934, as amended.
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From page 51... ...
Still, despite these changes in the environment, many contemporary issues related to broadband are, in fact, not new, as demonstrated by a review of three earlier reports by the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB)
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From page 52... ...
has the potential to both inhibit and promote investment. BROADBAND DEPLOYMENT TRENDS FCC data based on reports from carriers show rapid growth in broadband subscriptions by residential and small business customers, with the total growing from roughly 1.8 million in December 1999 to 5.2 million subscribers in December 2000 (see Figure 1.1~.5 Looking specifically at residential users, an October 2000 report from the National Telecommu5Interpretation is complicated because the figure includes small business as well as residential customers and because ADSL is separated from other forms of DSL, which are lumped under "other wireline."
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From page 53... ...
households, or 10.7 percent of households with Internet access, had broadband access as of August 2000.6 Market research reports from 2000 provide consistent figures; for example, a November 2000 study by the Cahners In-Stat Group found that roughly 9 percent of U.S. households that access the Internet use a form of broadband Internet access.7 Reports from mid-2001 show further growth: a total of more than 5 million cable modem subscribers and more than 3 million DSL subscribers.8 There have, however, been hints that growth has been slowing, at least in some market segments: second-quarter 2001 reports from Verizon and AT&T Broadband show growth below the 2000 rate, and early 2001 also saw contraction in the competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC)
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From page 54... ...
As Figure 1.2 shows in displaying the penetration of several communications technologies over the period 1970-2000, broadband is in the early stages of this process. For example, broadcast radio and television allows a network service provider to reach wide areas using relatively few transmission facilities (terrestrial or satellite)
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From page 55... ...
It took decades to achieve a reach to over 94 percent of households,l5 using copper wiring in the last mile, but the technical path to deployment—pervasive copper wiring backed by a centralized circuit switchwas, at least in retrospect, straightforward compared with what one observes with broadband today. This near-universal reach reflects both costs to network service providers and regulatory programs that promoted socalled universal service and provided financial support to providers to help realize that objective (regulatory history is briefly described in Chapter 5 in this report)
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From page 56... ...
Even dial-up Internet access is subject to variation. The speed ceiling is limited by the audio bandwidth of the public telephone network, but the floor depends on the quality of the individual telephone line.
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From page 57... ...
required to use a communications service, but it varies as to whether they purchase it directly or lease it from a service provider. Cable television reflects consumer willingness to pay for access to programming content, in contrast to broadcast content, which is for the most part paid for by advertising.
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From page 58... ...
The experience of the late 1990s confirmed the absence of a new killer application, and the experience of the early 2000s the recognition of weak performance or nonviability among many dot-coin venturesshowed that even broad categories of seemingly successful applications (such as various instances of electronic commerce) are not, in isolation, sufficient to drive investment in last mile technologies.
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From page 59... ...
Certain wireless technologies and certain approaches to the ISP business provide illustrations of something that falls short of a "full-service" Internet. Viewed as a "half-full glass," such offerings may expand Internet access and other activities to new groups of consumers; viewed as a "half-empty glass," they may deprive consumers of choices with various economic and social benefits associated with unfettered access to all Internet content.
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From page 60... ...
The challenging and sometimes necessarily speculative nature of this analysis makes it inherently imperfect. Notwithstanding these limitations, an additional goal of this report is to make useful recommendations about how best to maximize the potential impact and rewards of broadband, generally exploring what will be required to achieve ubiquitous broadband access, in the sense of both expanding the geographical reach of broadband facilities and addressing affordability issues.
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From page 61... ...
SETTING THE STAGE 61 Notwithstanding these and other challenges, the Committee on Broadband Last Mile Technology has attempted to put forth, by consensus, views about the broadband last mile that seek to have value in the 2to 10-year time frame. While such a time frame might seem to be daunting in the face of the rate at which some of the basic technologies are advancing (Moore's law and its kin)
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