As noted on Sunday (did you send in a question to the FCC Chair?), FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress today and then I imagine he’ll be everywhere talking about this plan. They released an Executive Summary today (pdf), which looks more like a To Do List than an Executive Summary. But if you plan on watching any of this on CSPAN (I imagine it will be on CSPAN, right?), this serves as a nice program to the festivities. What this seems to point to is an ambitious plan that counts extensive, fast and affordable broadband access as a key economic engine for the future. And it is a nice touch to roll this out during the week of the 25th anniversary of the Dot Com.
One of the major pieces here is the reclaiming of a fair bit of spectrum from TV stations and auctioning that off for mobile wireless use. This also includes increasing broadband access across the country, increasing broadband competition and upping the service level to 100 megabits/second 100 million customers in 10 years, more user privacy protections and an initiative to educate the currently computer illiterate. What isn’t here is the fervently wished for nationwide buildout by the government of a fiber network.
There’s lots of reporting (including the NYT article I linked to Sunday) noting that there will be a pitched battle over this plan from cable, telecoms and tech companies. But according to this blogpost from Comcast, they definitely dispute the idea that there will be a pitched battle over this plan — largely because they’ve been kept in the development loop here. (Thanks for this tip to Simon Owens, who has a fantastic blog called Bloggasm.) And the CEOs of a number of tech companies (no telecoms or cable companies here) sent a letter to the FCC Chairman broadly encouraging of this policy work.