Tackling Bandwidth in the Next Decade: Public and Private Approaches

In the last two days there have been numerous stories around the US government’s – by way of the FCC – efforts to provide 50-100 MBS to 100 million citizens by the year 2020. In addition to this goal, the plan lays out five additional goals:

1. US should lead the world in mobile innovation;

2. Every American should have access to robust broadband services;

3. Every community should have at least one high-speed broadband access point;

4. Every first responder should have access to nationwide wireless network; and,

5. To support clean energy initiatives, US households should have access to a high-speed network to more efficiently manage their households

This will be made available through a ”revenue-neutral” model that will be funded through an auction of 500 MHz of spectrum, recently made available due to the switch of TV broadcasts from analog to digital.

On the other end of the spectrum (pun not intended), Google is soliciting offers from cities and towns to build “an advanced data network capable of downloading Internet data at one billion bits per second”. The purpose, as publically stated, is to see just what the public can do with really high-speed Internet access. However, for their efforts, Google will look to sell access to that network on a subscription basis and, at those speeds, will be able to completely blow away the competition (if users select solely on the basis of download speeds).

The government’s plan represents a 16x-20x increase over currently available speeds, which would be in-line with expectations espoused by proponents of the Bandwidth Law. The Google plan, if (a) feasible and (b) implemented, would obliterate the underlying tenets of that law and would pose a significant challenge to the overlap of bandwidth, storage, and processing. Google could certainly supplement and complement the adoption of Internet speeds this high through its storage capabilities; however, where would the processing power come from in order to enable users to make meaningful use of these speeds? It seems as though the governmental approach is much more in-line with expectations among the other necessary components of the bandwidth-processing-storage triumvirate in order to maximize the value of all three.

By the way, there are Facebook fan pages put up by the different municipalities, but I could not find any Buzz feeds related to this:

http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=google+high+speed+internet&init=quick