Library

Links to Other Useful Sites

International Perspectives on the US National Broadband Plan

Video detailing the Broadband Breakfast Club. The site hosting the video describes the event as including “key industry officials and was moderated by Lynn Stanton, Senior Editor, TR Reports.” Any relation of this event to the acclaimed John Hughes coming of age film is tenuous at best.

Price of the Pipe

From the New America Foundation

The speed and price of a broadband connection are two important details about a broadband service that vary greatly between different countries. In comparing prices and speeds of broadband services around the globe, we find that the United States is among the most expensive and slowest of the countries surveyed in this report. Price is one of the main barriers to adoption, and prices for broadband in the U.S. are on the rise. Major steps need to be taken to bridge the speed and price disparities separating the U.S. from other industrialized countries.

Fiber-to-the-X: the economics of last-mile fiber

Lately the word “fiber” has started to become ubiquitous in advertisements for broadband. It’s a synonym for the future, for speed and quality. Everybody tries to connect that synonym to their brand, regardless of their actual network design. In the trade press, acronyms like FttX (which stands for Fiber-to-the-X, where X is your favorite letter or word) are used as if all last mile network architectures with optical fiber are more or less equal.

Retransmission Consent: Time For a Complete Overhaul?

Every season, viewers and sports fans seem to be held hostage to disputes between broadcasters and cable and DBS providers over the terms of carriage of broadcast stations and affiliated programming. Is the must carry/retransmission consent model that underlies these disputes in need of a complete overhaul? This is an especially important question now, because thousands of carriage agreements will be up for renewal this year. This program will examine the real issues underlying retransmission consent disputes and the economics and politics driving these issues.

Broadcast v. Broadband: You Decide

Blair Levin, Executive Director of the FCC’s Omnibus Broadband initiative, will join hosts Jim Baller and Marty Stern to discuss the latest thinking on repurposing broadcast spectrum for wireless broadband as part of the National broadband Plan, and how the idea has evolved since it was raised in late 2009, including the recently proposed “Mobile Future Auction.”

Connecting America: Broadband & Economic Opportunity

By the FCC

While broadband enabled technologies have clearly brought tremendous economic benefits, the benefits have not reached enough businesses, communities and American workers. Ensuring innovation flourishes across all aspects of the broadband system—broadband networks, devices, and applications—is crucial to the future of the country. The FCC will partner with businesses, including women-owned and minority-owned enterprises, as well as investors and entrepreneurs from all backgrounds to support a flourishing digital economy, and ensure that all Americans can enjoy the benefits of broadband opportunity.

A National Town Hall on the Broadband Stimulus Program

Separate Notices of Funds Availability (NOFA) and programmatic rules have just been released for the second and final round of funding under the Broadband Stimulus with several Billions of dollars in funding available in this last round. Applications for this second round are due in just over a month, on March 15, and this interactive live workshop will provide a first look at what’s changed from the first round and what applicants need to know in putting together successful broadband grant and loan applications.

Does Broadband Boost Local Economic Development?

This report assesses whether policies to raise broadband availability will contribute, as hoped, to local economic development. PPIC analysis relies on the fact that broadband technology has diffused unevenly throughout the United States, thus allowing us to compare economic indicators between areas with greater and less growth in broadband availability. Using broadband data from the Federal Communications Commission and economic data from several government and proprietary sources, researchers examine broadband availability and economic activity throughout the nation between 1999 and 2006.

Broadband Infrastructure and Economic Growth

By Nina Czernich, Oliver Falck, Tobias Kretschmer, Ludger Woessmann

We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental-variable model derives its non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice-telephony and cable-TV networks predict maximum broadband penetration. We find that a 10 percentage-point increase in broadband penetration raises annual per-capita growth by 0.9-1.5 percentage points. Results are robust to country and year fixed effects and controlling for linear second-stage effects of our instruments. We verify that our instruments predict broadband penetration but not diffusion of contemporaneous technologies like mobile telephony and computers.