National broadband plan to be evergreen

The FCC's 10-year National Broadband Plan being unveiled today will be many things, but, prime among them all it will be reflective of the times. Unlike other federal mandates and policies over the years, the broadband plan will be evergreen so that it can accommodate change, improvements and other shifts in the technology it supports.

The FCC has unfortunately chosen to call the evergreen concept beta, conjuring either bad images of video recording technology or first-effort, bug-filled early adopter trial-and-error rollouts. But the idea is good: don't put a box around what needs to be free to grow.

The plan to connect 100 million U.S. households to 100 Mbps service in the next 10 years is not only gaining the attention of incumbent U.S. service providers where 100 Mbps is a premium service with a premium price, it has caught the eyes of the world. An Australian publication, in fact, made it a point to note that U.S. connection speeds average less than 4 Mbps and that puts the country 18th in the world behind such speed demons as South Korea and Japan.

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