Institute For The Future

No S-Curve for Broadband Deployment... Yet

We don't often talk about mundane issues like network infrastructure deployment here at IFTF. Many of our forecasts just assume that high capacity network media will be widely available. However, quite a number of federal regulatory actions have been going on recently that bring into doubt the future ubiquity of broadband in the U.S....

 

In July, the FCC released its most recent biannual report on broadband deployment. Let's set aside the fact that the FCC still defines "high-speed lines" as "connections that deliver services at speeds exceeding 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in at least one direction."

 

While the "last mile" problem has been widely recognized for a decade, there's only recently been much attention on just how slow U.S. residential broadband deployment has been. Most people thought that things were improving - we do seem to have real competition developing as municipal wireless networks built on unlicensed spectrum are popping up everywhere, and Broadband over Power Line attacts high-profile investments from IBM and Google.

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So far, there's no S-curve for broadband in the US. What's the hold up? Bad policy, or a lack of compelling broadband applications? I'm guessing both - I'm willing to pay $50/month for broadband but only if I can do what I want with it. Like download music! Oops, not allowed to do that!

 

(Note: For a pile of more information, all 200+ pages of my dissertation looked at some of the geographic barriers to broadband deployment in the U.S.)