Calif. Broadband Report a Waste of Time
It’s 84 PDF pages long, filled with attractive photos of fiber-optic cable as well as informative graphs, tables and statistics about broadband usage, pricing and geographical coverage. But without any active buy-in from players with skin in the game — meaning top legislators and the biggest communications providers — the California Broadband Task Force’s recent report is a massive waste of our time, offering a Fantasyland blueprint for a broadband nirvana that will likely never come to pass.
Why? Because without a political or private-sector champion, the task force’s guidelines will remain just that — guidelines — and will leave us here on the Left Coast no closer to better broadband then we were before the politically and economically correct assemblage of folks embarked on their year-long study of the obvious. Perhaps the well-researched topics and well-intentioned recommendations can become a starting point for real implementation plans, and if so, then the staffers and executive assistants who did the real work are to be commended for at least getting the ball rolling. But the reality of the situation — specifically the state’s current billions in budget deficits — says that without any active backers, the broadband plan won’t be anything more than a fancy-looking report for the foreseeable future.
On the plus side, the task force report does offer up a wealth of broadband information — pricing, coverage, usage rates — that should be helpful to anyone wondering what the next best steps should be. But with huge public-service budget cuts looming in California, my guess is that most state politicians will look at the report statistic that says “96 percent of California residences have access to broadband” and say “that’s good enough for now.”
When it comes to political mindshare, the topic of better broadband is always going to lose to matters closer to the electorate’s heart and soul — jobs, health care and social services. As well it should. The other problem with broadband infrastructure is that it doesn’t typically break in a dramatic fix-it-now fashion like a highway bridge or a dike. But like those other infrastructures, it needs ongoing attention to keep a massive outage from striking when its services are most needed. So ignoring broadband is also not an option, if the state wants to stay competitive in a digital economy.
Instead of a toothless “task force,” a better idea might have been for Gov. Schwarzenegger to haul a few state senators and some Verizon and AT&T execs into his famed smoking tent and cook up a real public-private partnership with some concrete goals. Why not try a test buildout of an open-interconnect infrastructure in a rural area, one of the task force’s recommendations?
That’s the kind of real arm-twisting leadership it’s going to take to get civic-minded infrastructure improvements done — bringing together the players who can or want to make things happen, and forging a compromise where there are benefits for all involved. Ordering a task force report is like commissioning a script without having a producer or a studio signed up to support it. In the end it might be a good read — but no movie ever gets made.
