The Net neutrality debate and broadband adoption have one thing in common: they both involve national policy butting heads with the local business interests of carrier companies, says David S. Isenberg, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and a former distinguished member of technical staff at AT&T Laboratories.
Because the cost of the network is falling -- or, depending on how you look at it, performance for the same cost is improving -- Isenberg believes that telephone and cable companies could be giving their customers a lot more. He estimates that in Japan, where broadband subscribers per capita outnumber those in America by 24 percent, the service is six or seven times as fast, as much as 100 megabytes, for roughly the same monthly price, about $50.
"The reason is not that Japan has better technology, because everybody in the world has the same technology; the reason has to do with politics and policy," Isenberg says. "If the U.S. had a different policy for broadband, we might see a factor of 10 increase at the same price and our network carriers would make money."
Governments in Japan as well as Korea, Finland and other countries with high amounts of access have all operated according to the belief that building the broadband infrastructure is a critical component of a competitive economy.
"The government either helped subsidize the price or pushed network providers to go faster," Taplin of USC says. "Instead of taking a 'we'll let the market figure it out' approach, the Koreans said this is a critical part of a competitive economy, we're going to make sure we get good cheap broadband in place quickly. And they did."
Closer to home, across the northern border in Canada, a high-speed connection is available to 90 percent of the population, and two-thirds choose to go online with it, for about $30 per month. The province of Alberta has just completed the SuperNet, a $260 million project that laid 12,000 kilometers of fiber and wireless technology for broadband service in 429 communities, 95 percent of the province.
"Our government policy for the last several years has been concerned with connectivity," says Charles Zamaria, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto who helped write a report last November for the Canadian Internet Project. "The public supports public policy that supports infrastructure deployment rather than leaving it to commercial interests."
And it helps, he says, that the country's telecoms wired for high-speed the first time they wired for cable. "It didn't mean there had to be a complete rewiring. In many of the first original rollouts it was in anticipation of high speed."
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