U.S. broadband lags behind international competitors. And yet another studyrecently showed how much the U.S. lags behind international broadband.
This is not news. What is news is that the study was commissioned by the FCC and executed by Harvard University’s Berkman Center, and they came to the conclusion that the most successful countries in broadband deployment have done one thing very differently from the U.S. – they have made their main carriers open up their networks to competing service providers.
In other words, since the barrier to entry for broadband is so high, by requiring existing carriers to lease out access to their networks, it creates an incentive for competition in the broadband market, leading to lower prices, better service, and better performance.
By contrast, the FCC, early in this decade, decided not to require open access, based on an idea that forcing broadband providers to lease out their lines would create a disincentive towards investing in higher capacity networks.
But, according to the study:
“The emphasis other countries place on open access policies appears to be warranted by the evidence.
We find that in countries where an engaged regulator enforced open access obligations, competitors that entered using these open access facilities provided an important catalyst for the development of robust competition which, in most cases, contributed to strong broadband performance across a range of metrics. Today these competitors continue to play, directly or through successor companies, a central role in the competitiveness of the markets they inhabit.”
The FCC is now issuing a call for public comments on the study.
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