NBP Needs Yearly Reviews, Levin Says
Instead of looking back after five years of implementation, the National Broadband Plan should be reviewed each year, said NBP author Blair Levin, now of the Brookings Institution, during a panel Wednesday at the institution. "Somebody on an annual basis…
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should be saying, 'How are we doing?'" he said. "I asked the chairman of the FCC to do that, but his PR person vetoed it saying if we did that, people would criticize us, and I just said, 'Well, that's a good thing.' We should be willing to be judged." The discussion comes as the NBP marks its five-year anniversary this year and focused on development of the plan, the changes that have been made over the past five years and what lies ahead for U.S. broadband development. The plan has changed the focus of the FCC permanently, said Austin Schlick, Google director-communications law. "Broadband is now the preeminent service overseen by the FCC. I think that most commissioners would agree." Since moving forward with the plan's spectrum portions, companies such as AT&T have embraced the use of unlicensed spectrum, which has helped to remedy the traffic overload, said Schlick, who was general counsel at the FCC when the NBP was issued. To move forward with the national plan and continue to make universal access a reality, Levin said that states have to want to play a role in the deployment of broadband. Part of that involves the Google Fiber initiative. Every time Google announces it's coming to a new city, the telcos are right behind in announcing gigabit service as well, said Schlick. Often, existing telcos are able to get gigabit service deployed before Google because the company has to start from scratch, he said. "You can see a price difference between markets where we are and markets where we aren't, but this is a good thing," Schlick said. "Companies provide better service at lower prices where we enter the market, and now you're seeing deployment of gigabit networks where Google is not at all. The idea has caught on."