National Broadband Director Blair Levin: “National Broadband Plan Will Encourage Investment”
Blair Levin
Writing on the FTC’s broadband blog, BlogBand, National Broadband Initiative Director Blair Levin made the case that the National Broadband Plan will spur increased investment on both the supply and demand side of “every part of the [broadband] ecosystem in the long-term.”
He detailed how the plan would do so:
“The plan will accelerate the move of certain sectors from processes designed and optimized for the technology of the past to more efficient processes enabled by broadband.”
He wrote that “certain sectors of the economy,” including health care, education, public safety, energy and government services; have yet to adopt new broadband-enabled processes effectively. He continued, “we have identified barriers to use that, if overcome, should spark an important increase in the demand for broadband access across the board.”
He refers readers to a slide from the NBI’s September, 2009 meeting that is pertinent to a study of how cloud-based electronic health records could save doctors 18% over installing their own servers. ”These savings are enjoyed even though for such hosting to work,” he wrote, “the doctors have to spend twice as much on connectivity. As noted in the slide, the dollar savings are only the beginning of the benefits of such services.”
On Tuesday, Director Levin wrote about the challenges of expanding broadband access. ”Since I started using ATM machines and moved to online banking, I, like millions of others, don’t exchange information with a bank the way I did 10 or even 5 years ago.” Director Levin then asks, ”Why is it that when I recently had the occasion to visit a great emergency room in Chicago, they collected data from me just like a hospital I visited while in college?”
He attributes the lag in adopting broadband to “diffusion lag,” the time it takes for one technical system to replace another. He points to turn-of-the-2oth-century factories that “didn’t reach 50% electrification until four decades after the first central power station opened.”
He says the cause of the problem is the inital cost of replacing “production technologies adapted to the old regime,” in this case, steam power. “The problem was not just getting the electricity…So today, some sectors of our economy have a diffusion lag in adopting their processes to take advantage of the modern communications era.”
Thus he makes the case for the National Broadband Initiative, “The plan will present ways we need to act to remove those barriers, overcome the diffusion lag and capture the opportunities that others are already seizing.”
Time will tell whether the plan lives up to Director Levin’s ambitious promises.
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