If today’s candidates for President have a broadband strategy for rural America, it amounts to little more than bringing the inadequate and over priced broadband offered up to urban residents to their country cousins. This is hardly a path towards recapturing global communications leadership for America. More of the same old same old …

For an example of the more of the same old same old strategy, an about to be new wireline telephone company proudly announces it will bring a new and better ADSL to 24 communities. Not only does this leave 106 sister communities NOT served, but within the 24 only a donut hole about 6 miles across will be served. Further the quality of the the connection falls off, attenuates, rapidly as you get further from the center. This approximately 27 sq. mile donut hole even leaves most the of the people in the 24 communities unserved. In fact, it will only “serve” about 11% of the 6,000 sq. miles in the greater area.

To make matters worse, the communications incumbents are winning the war to wipe out the Internet as an effective political tool. The recent FCC decision on the coming 700 mhz auction is a harbinger of a return to the world of closed walled gardens where the providers control the services and the content. The Information Superhighway: R.I.P.

Given that the internet is fast becoming the new Post Office, should we not demand that it adhere to the same standards of open access that Ben Franklin, our first Post Master General, set for the first U.S. Postal Service? Franklin insisted that all should have access to the Postal Service and that the Post Masters could neither selectively bar content from the service nor limit the destinations of the mails. Just as all have access to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system and trolls are neither allowed to selectively bar access nor limit destinations.

In the end, this reminds me of the opportunity Lyndon Johnson saw in the Sad Irons of West Texas hill country. “He [Robert Caro] took, for instance, what should have been the most boring subject on earth-the advent of rural electrification-and turned it into a chapter called “The Sad Irons,” which may be the most brilliant single passage of prose ever written about Texas.” It is brilliant.

As late as 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron and the dim kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. All across the United States, wrote a public-power advocate “every city ‘white way’ ends abruptly at the city limits. Beyond lies darkness.” The lack of electric power, writes the historian William E. Leuchtenberg, had divided the United States into two nations: “the city dwellers and the country folk”; farmers, he wrote, “toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who enviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their back breaking chores like peasant women in a pre-industrial age.” . . .

But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.

“Oh my God,” her mother said, “The house is on fire!”

But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”

They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

Rural Broadband sounds boring, but it could be the Sad Irons of the 21st century. We could choose to use the rural broadband issue to catalyze Team America to leap frog the country back to a position of global leadership in communications. This will require bold leadership as the only honest answer to this is to adopt a model of abundant spectrum: Open spectrum.

While adopting an Abundant Spectrum model will gore the oxen and business models of the communications incumbents, we have no choice if we want recapture global leadership in communications, the true foundation of: national security, a robust 21st century economy, a modern politics, and an essential tool for addressing the issue of global climate change.

If, instead, we settle for more of the tired same old same old being offered up by today’s candidates, we will be destined to try to communicate and compete in the 21st century with with the equivalent of the Sad Irons of West Texas of the last century.

Is this best we can ask our leaders to do?

For more on this:

1] Robert X. Cringely: Game Over: The U.S. is unlikely to ever regain its broadband leadership

2] Glenn Fleishman in Business Week

3] Art Brodsky: The Timidity of the FCC

4] Paul Baran’s 1994 keynote: visions-of-the-21st-century-communications.pdf Is
the Shortage of Radio Spectrum for Broadband Networks of the Future a Self Made Problem?

5] FCC: The Best Policy Money Can Buy

6] Why Open Spectrum Matters, The End of the Broadcast Nation

7] FCC 1981: Notice of Inquiry (NOI) initiated to gather information that will assist the Commission in formulating policy regarding wideband modulation techniques. NOI seeks to identify radio services which might benefit from these techniques and methods to characterize the technical parameters of wideband signals. One particular type of wideband modulation, spread spectrum, is examined in detail. GEN Docket No. 81-413

Note:

By the time of the 1984 NPRM, this NOI had been gutted. The 1985 FCC R&O allowed only a tiny slice of spectrum to be “unlicensed”. The WiFi revolution, to their amazement, was an unintended consequence.

8] 1998 Bell Labs Scientists Shatter Limit on Fixed Wireless Transmission

9] MORGAN’S MONDAY MUSING MAKEUP: CARO’S TRIUMPH

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