NCTA's Powell Sees Need for New Approaches to Rural Broadband Gap
Closing the rural broadband gap is going to require looking at more network tools, such as satellite delivery of broadband service, NCTA CEO Michael Powell said in a segment of C-SPAN's The Communicators that's to be televised starting Saturday (and to be available here). Powell said discussion of a national infrastructure plan is overdue, but that broadband -- which has been attracting sizable private investment -- should be looked at differently from needs like crumbling bridges and roads.
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Any rural broadband plan needs to be more fiscally disciplined than often has been the case in the past, Powell said. "Money will always try to creep back to the parts of the market that are semi-economic ... while communities that have nothing ... remain unserved." Powell touted the FCC as being a good organization for addressing rural broadband gap issues, rather than Congress creating a new program.
Powell said any net neutrality debate has to focus on the FCC's Title II Communications Act approach, not on the agency's totally separate decision about protecting open internet values. He said under the traditional regulatory compact the FCC struck in the 1990s, ISPs "would be lightly regulated .. but they had to stay cognizant of the he critical importance of openness to the consumer." He said the agency has since increasingly made net regulations about producers seeking regulatory advantage over competitors than about consumers. Powell said using such tactics as throttling and paid prioritization "was never a compelling strategy" for cable ISPs, the evidence being they didn't engage in it when there weren't rules blocking it.
Powell called it "completely natural" for cable operators to expand into wireless space, since huge amounts of wireless traffic are carried over wireline infrastructure and 5G will rely on fixed broadband capacity. He said cable companies like Comcast and Charter Communications -- both of which have indicated plans to move into wireless offerings -- differ from traditional wireless operators only in that they haven't been owners of proprietary spectrum or selling handsets to consumers.
Powell, a former FCC chairman, said he hopes Chairman Ajit Pai will look at reorganizing the agency. "Making sure it maps with the market is always important," Powell said. With the public often not seeing differences between the internet and services it supports, he said, "To act like in policy those are radically different things ... is wrong."
Vast numbers of services like IoT, autonomous driving and machine learning will rely on unlicensed spectrum, and predicted growth of those services is leading to expectations of an unlicensed spectrum crunch, Powell said. In response, the government needs to look for additional contiguous spectrum, he said. He said there needs to be improved sharing and increased pressure put on the software and design industries to become better at compression and software design so devices and services don't consume as much bandwidth. "A huge part of why Netflix is good is because their software engineering lets high quality come through smaller space," he said.
Powell said Near Future -- the April 27 event NCTA and CableLabs is putting on (see 1703060044) -- succeeds NCTA's INTX trade show as a "fresher" route. The event, with its focus on such applications as virtual reality and autonomous vehicles, is "intended to postulate what we see happening in the near future," Powell said. In a blog post Thursday, NCTA said the event "will bring together top influencers in technology, policy, and media [and] approach the topic of next-generation technology in an entirely new way, by exploring how four pillars of human-technology interactivity -- the way we live, work, learn, and play -- are being reimagined."