We live with a stark digital divide in the US since a significant proportion of citizens cannot access high speed broadband. This impacts access to education and services, jobs, business opportunities, as well as reliable communication.
According to the FCC’s own 2016 Broadband Progress Report, 39 percent of Americans living in rural areas lack access to ‘superfast’ (25Mbps) broadband, leaping to 41 percent of Americans living in Tribal lands.
Broadband access is also a problem in many suburban and urban locations. In these areas, where over 80 percent of Americans live, countless fiber broadband projects have been stalled or abandoned, and consumers have very little choice over their internet service provider, due to long held monopolies by gorilla service providers. This is despite a staggering $84 billion of government subsidies to date.
A new Broadband Access Coalition of internet service providers has joined forces with consumer, schools and health care advocacy groups to petition the FCC to open up the airwaves for spectrum best suited to a new, superfast broadband service for the whole of America.
This new approach does not rely solely on fiber, which is costly and difficult to deploy, but instead harnesses wireless broadband. This technology can be deployed at up to one tenth the cost of laying new fiber cabling to homes, with far fewer disruptions and project delays. It can also bring new superfast Wi-Fi services to areas that have no or little choice over their broadband provider.
94 percent of our internet traffic traverses Wi-Fi and home or business broadband connections — not more expensive cellular airwaves. The coalition’s petition proposes to open up new wireless spectrum for improving broadband services cost-effectively. This spectrum can provide great coverage in under served rural areas, and can stimulate new competitive Internet Service Providers to enter the market and connect dense suburban areas. Unfortunately, the mobile industry is lobbying to secure this new spectrum band for its own exclusive use.
Over 98 percent of Americans now live in areas covered by 4G LTE cellular networks. This sounds good in theory, but in reality, low speed, congestion and high data costs make this an unattractive option for consumers. This has led to prices for LTE bandwidth being nearly 120 times that of traditional broadband data plans. The average price for mobile data in the United States is $6 per GB, while the average price for fixed data is just 5 cents per gigabyte (GB).
Recent data from iGR Research tells us that American families consume 190GB per month, on average, over home broadband connections. Consuming this amount of data in the home using mobile phones is implausible and extremely costly. With ‘unlimited’ data plans hard-throttling customers at 22GB per month, and the average 4K movie consuming up to 14GB, it simply isn’t viable for most Americans to only use 4G for their home broadband needs.
We’re quickly reaching a point where there will be one network traffic source that really matters in the world, and that’s the internet. Landline voice service became obsolete about five years ago. Traditional paid TV services are rapidly moving in the same direction.
Superfast broadband delivering Wi-Fi into the home supports a full range of internet and TV applications, such as Netflix and other on-demand services. However, what we now need is freedom of choice for affordable, superfast internet to satisfy pent-up consumer demand.
The new wireless approach means consumers no longer have to be tethered to any physical infrastructure. Unlike challenging other traditional utilities, action doesn’t require consumers to overhaul their homes — all they have to do is make their voices heard. Here’s where: www.broadbandamerica.org
Jaime Fink is the CPO and Co-Founder of Mimosa Networks based in Santa Clara. He wrote this for The Mercury News.
