Regulating telecom is not an easy task and often causes more trouble than it’s worth. That’s why analyst Tom Nolle of CIMI Corp. doesn’t expect Congress to take a second swipe at broadband legislation following the stimulus bill. And maybe that’s for the best, he said, given the complexity of these issues and the fact that if implemented incorrectly national broadband potentially could turn telecom into the next industry in need of a bailout.
xchange: You mentioned this proposed broadband stimulus is limited to target only areas considered “unserved” or “underserved” in terms of broadband (Editor’s Note: This interview was done the day before the Senate Finance Committee talked about adding the new tax credits discussed in our main piece on broadband policy.) What else did people think it would address?
Nolle: When the concept came along, the industry, meaning tech networking and some others including Adelstein of the FCC, were kind of of the view that the objective of the broadband stimulus should be to create parity in broadband between the U.S. and other market areas. And that parity is not created by attempting to touch underserved areas. There are, in fact, pretty significant data points that suggest that a lot of the so-called underserved areas are underserved because they don’t want to be served. So it’s not clear how much additional, incremental broadband penetration we would achieve even with a program that aggressively went after everybody that didn’t have [broadband] now.
xchange: Right, there was a Pew research poll that recently came out on that.
Nolle: Exactly, and that’s always been an issue. In fact, I blogged just recently that I had an interesting conversation with a guy when I was attending a GPS class, and he was a classical example. He didn’t have a computer. He didn’t want a computer. Now he’s higher than the average income. Obviously more educated than the average person. And yet at the same time he doesn’t want a computer.
And so the thing that I think is important about broadband stimulus is first of all that there has been just a whole legion of objectives set for it and because of the not-unusual vagueness of the legislative process there are a lot of people who thought this was going to be more than what it turned out to be. The consensus of the industry was that there was going to be about $44 billion spent [on broadband], and some of the estimates ranged as high as $100 billion.
