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Next up: the FCC. These guys are the big cheese of wireless communications in the United States. If it were not for them, we would probably have our airwaves polluted with amateurs invading the AM/FM waves, people broadcasting personal television stations, and who knows what else. In any event, the latest big endeavor for the FCC is their goal to provide high speed internet access (AKA Broadband) to everyone in the United States. Fortunately, most of us in the States already have a decent broadband connection, but the FCC claims that there are still 100 million unfortunate souls without high speed internet access. So the main purpose of Broadband Everywhere is to provide those people with a speedy, reliable connection.

Now since you probably already have a high speed internet connection you might ask “What’s in it for the rest of us? ” or “How much is this going to cost me?”. Good questions. In addition to expanding broadband access in general, one of the goals of the Broadband Plan is to provide average download speeds of AT LEAST 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of AT LEAST 50 Mbps. That sounds like a great deal to me. I’m “only” getting about 9 Mbps down with 1 Mbps up speeds right now.

So far I have seen very little about how this whole thing is going to be funded. If there is information about the cost for this system and how much it will cost users/tax payers it is very well hidden on the FCC web site. I did find an article that claims that this national broadband will cost “$12-16 billion over a ten year period”. But if you think about a network that will have an estimated 200 million users, at a rate of approximately $1.6 billion/year, that is only $8/month… not bad at all. Especially when compared to the $40-$60/month that most people currently pay for much slower broadband access.

The biggest complaint that I have heard so far is from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Since the FCC wants to provide wireless broadband access to rural areas, they are going to require about 500 MHz of spectrum to do so. The broadband plan proposes that 120 MHz of that come from the digital over-the-air TV spectrum. Television broadcasters just spent tens of millions of dollars transitioning to all digital television last year and the NAB claims that if they lose some of their digital spectrum that it will simply cost them too much money. The FCC’s counter to that argument is that only one to two digital carriers in rural areas will really be effected by this bandwidth reallocation and if the broadcasters are innovative, there could be even fewer broadcast losses than that. One possible option is to reduce the size of the “deadband” between over-the-air television stations. Since broadcast is all digital now, it requires much less of a buffer zone between stations than old analog television did.

How all of this plays out will be very interesting to see. I have only briefly touched on the very long, dense list of things that the FCC would like to do with this plan. If this plan goes through, it is much, much more than just a broadband for everyone plan. If you would like to find out more you should check out the links in this post. You could easily spend days reading about all of the details of this potentially major change in communication standards in the United States.