National Broadband Plan a ‘Fantastic Step,’ MMTC Told
The FCC National Broadband Plan is a “fantastic step in the right direction,” One Economy CEO Kelley Dunne told the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council conference. The federal funding and corporate matches proposed would help One Economy, which is working to increase broadband adoption in low income communities, connect 27,000 housing units to “subsidized broadband connections,” he said late Thursday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The cost of wireless broadband like 4G is “anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth of the cost of deploying traditional wireline services,” making it easier for companies to share costs and reducing the “at-risk capital for providing coverage to lower income areas,” Dunne said. Moving toward wireless broadband networks like 4G alone is “not an answer independent of increasing the capacity of our wired network,” said Debbie Goldman, telecommunications policy director for the Communications Workers of America. “They are absolutely integrated.” Dunne agreed.
The NTIA has reported that 77.3 percent of Asian-Americans have home broadband, but that’s “very misleading,” said Jason Lagria, a telecom and broadband policy staff attorney at the Asian American Justice Center. “I always cringe when I hear the NTIA’s report. That whole survey was done in English.” Sixty percent of Asian Americans are foreign-born and 30 percent have limited English proficiency, he said. “When you look at the Asian Americans who speak English, they're probably a lot better off,” and more likely to have adopted the Internet, than those who don’t, Lagria said.
"The government can do a lot more” when it comes to content and relevancy needed to get Latin Americans online and involved with the Internet, said Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “Only about 1-3 percent of government content online is in Spanish.” Hispanic families in low-income areas are less likely to see the content online as relevant when it isn’t in Spanish, especially when the costs buying broadband service take “a significant chunk out of a low income family’s budget,” he said. Wilkes asked MMTC members and government officials to provide relevant Spanish-language content on corporate and agency websites, so “Latin American communities can partake in what the companies and Internet has to offer.” Activity like Internet-based “scams” and malware also is a problem, he said. “When somebody gets burned, they get turned off,” and some people are starting to think Internet access is “not worth it,” Wilkes said.