Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 1, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
In recent years, the government had failed to provide sufficient incentives for growth and competition in the rapidly growing internet market. Broadband internet access in particular remained a sore point for government and industry.
In 2004, President Bush promised that all US citizens should have affordable high-speed internet access available to them by 2007 at the latest. A series of international studies had previously shown that the USA lagged significantly behind other countries in broadband internet access. In 2006, for example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development http://www.oecd.org ranked the United States only 15th in broadband internet access per person. By comparison: as recently as 2001, it had ranked fourth internationally. Considering the relevant developments in emerging countries such as China or India, this fall is very worrying to many.
According to the NTIA report, by the end of 2006 around 99 percent of all US regions had at least one broadband internet service provider nearby. Analysis of the available volume of data therefore indicated that the original target of affordable broadband access for all US citizens had been achieved successfully “to a high degree”. Critics doubt this, however. The accusation is that the data are not being interpreted correctly. A broadband provider, for example, need serve only a single residence in each postcode region, yet the region would still be rated positively in the study.
The NTIA report draws its conclusions based on data from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other sources. The FCC figures state that the total number of broadband lines rose from 6.8 million in December 2000 to 82.5 million in the same month of 2006. It must be borne in mind, however, that the definition of the term “broadband” is often purely subjective. Under FCC provisions, the term applies to connection speeds of 200 kilobit per second.
