WASHINGTON-The questions of whether eligible telecommunications carrier status should be awarded to wireless carriers and whether wireless carriers will deploy their broadband solutions without it was a hot topic as state regulators held their annual winter meetings here last week.
The National Association of Regulatory Commissioners got one answer to those questions when Michael Armstrong, chief executive officer of AT&T Corp., spoke to them. Armstrong said AT&T’s Project Angel, currently being tested in Dallas and expected to be deployed in three additional markets by year-end, will not work to bring broadband access to rural America without subsidies.
“It is a technology that could serve rural areas … but I don’t think in all rural areas there will be enough of a critical mass without some form of subsidization. [These subsidies] will have to apply to wireless approaches as well as wireline approaches,” Armstrong said.
Project Angel reserves 10 megahertz of mobile spectrum for fixed-wireless applications. Armstrong later said he is not worried about over-burdening his mobile system because Angel does not need contiguous spectrum so other spectrum can be found for it in areas where the 10 megahertz is needed for mobile applications.
Armstrong’s presentation was bolstered by other speakers who pointed to wireless as a option worth considering.
“As we move into the broadband, the solution may not be a wireline solution. It may need to have a wireless component to it; it may need to be completely wireless,” said Greg Rohde, assistant commerce secretary for telecommunications and information.
State regulators are wary of wireless because unlike wireline they don’t regulate wireless but they may be warming to wireless in their hunt for broadband solutions.
Not only state regulators, but federal regulators, have taken up the broadband cause. The Federal Communications Commission is currently accepting comments on a notice of inquiry into whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.
The information is being requested to prepare the second of a continuing series of reports on the state of broadband as dictated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The FCC released its first report on Feb. 2, 1999. In that report it said advanced telecom services-defined at that time as upstream and downstream of 200 kilobits per second-were being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion.
Some on Capitol Hill objected to this characterization. This year, the FCC admitted that last year’s report “lacked information at that time to determine whether high-speed services were reaching rural and inner-city users and persons with disabilities.”
This year’s study specifically asks respondents to compare and contrast wireless and wireline.
“Do the economics of deploying advanced telecommunications capability differ from one technology (for example, wireline) to another (for example, wireless)?” asks the FCC in its NOI.
Additionally, the study asks whether the bit rate of 200 Kbps is an accurate description noting that some believe speeds greater than 128 Kbps in a wireless environment to be broadband.
Comments on the NOI are due Mar. 20 and replies on April 4.
It is not only regulators, legislators are also concerned about the deployment of broadband-especially to rural America.
A bill that would allow regional Bell operating companies to offer long-distance data is gaining momentum in the House.
“The only issue I see moving to the floor is interLATA data legislation,” said Jessica A. Zufolo, NARUC legislative director for telecommunications, consumer protection and water.
This bill is worrisome to both the state regulators and Armstrong. Indeed Armstrong said the bill, introduced by top telecommunications lawmakers in the House of Representatives will “turn the telecom act on its head.”
“The Tauzin-Dingell [referring to Reps. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), chairman of the House telecom subcommittee, and John Dingell (D-Mich.), ranking House Democrat] bill-H.R. 2420-would drop that carrot into the RBOCs’ laps with no regard for whether they’ve first opened their markets to competition,” Armstrong said.
If this piece of legislation and others like it aren’t the answer maybe a bill to give low-interest loans will fit the bill. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced that he will soon introduce legislation to create a broadband loan program fashioned after the Rural Electricity Administration that helped to provide electricity to rural America.
The program will offer low-interest loans and uncap the universal service fund to build out broadband services in rural America, Dorgan said.
