Broadband Plan's Rough Start

Filed under Infrastructure, by Peter Elstrom on March 12

It looks like the Obama Administration’s effort to improve broadband Internet service is off to a rocky start. As BW’s Arik Hesseldahl reports, government officials managing the program are offering few answers to executives and entrepreneurs interested in finding out how it will work. There is supposed to be $7.2 billion in grants and loans allocated for the broadband effort, with the first checks being cut by June, but it’s unclear what criteria will be used to dole that money out.

An excerpt from Arik’s story and question after the jump:

On Mar. 10, Dan Spatz joined hundreds of other people who crammed into a 500-seat auditorium at the Commerce Dept. building in Washington, D.C. The crowd of executives, entrepreneurs, and local officials had gathered for the first public hearing about how the federal government plans to distribute $7.2 billion in grants and loans to improve broadband Internet access in the U.S.

Spatz, a city official from The Dalles, Ore., took the microphone to ask a relatively simple question: How would the government determine which regions in the country are "unserved," a critical definition because those areas without broadband service are supposed to take priority under the legislation passed by Congress.

"The short answer is we've not made a decision," said Mark Seifert, a senior adviser at the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA), one of two government agencies responsible for doling out the broadband money. "We're waiting for you to help us get to those definitions."

And so it went again and again. At the first public discussion of the Obama Administration's much heralded broadband plan, government officials offered virtually no hard answers to the hundreds of people who gathered in person and the 2,500 more who participated via live Web video. For almost every substantive question about how the billions will be allocated, officials said they're looking for guidance from the public.

The lack of answers proved frustrating for some participants. Charlie Mattingly, chief executive of a small Internet service provider in Texas called Broadband Rural, was taken aback that the meeting wasn't more productive. "I had no idea how full of themselves they are in Washington," he said. "If we had half the money that the government spent to put on this meeting today and half of the money that people spent to attend it, we could have put 1,000 people online," he said.

What does this say about the prospects for the broadband stimulus program? If the program runs into (minor) delays, will that be for the best in the end because the approach will be well thought out?

Another key question is how far the $7.2 billion will go and what it will end up buying? Smart people we've talked to say the only way to cover rural areas economically is to use wireless technology. Trouble it, wireless technology won't get you the speeds of fiber. Five MB a second would be pretty good for wireless. But it's a long way from the speeds available in leading broadband countries, such as Korea and Japan.