We live in a civil society – a place where primary education is freely available to all, where anyone can enjoy a walk through our public parks or down our sidewalks and freely drive through the streets. Libraries across the country loan out books for free – literature that you can read on a spring day in our parks or beneath the streetlights on main street on a warm summer's evening. You don't have to tip the firemen who show up at your house or pay for police protection – in a civil society, public safety is freely available to everyone.
We enjoy myriad services and resources that we don't pay for each and every time we use them. Yet each of these key facets of contemporary society was part of a new social contract, often adopted only after years of battle and turmoil to overcome a prior status quo (from private fire and educational services to for-fee libraries and parks). Eventually, however, new models are seen to provide such an enormous benefit to the entire population that we're willing to invest in ideas that lift all boats. We realise that, as a society, each of us is better off when certain basic services are freely available to all.
At the dawn of the digital era, during this first decade of the 21st century, the most important new commodity is internet access. A growing canon of research has documented the enormous benefits that accrue to those with broadband access (and the increasing detriments faced by those without it). Within many civil societies, in much the same way the agrarian revolution helped eliminate famine, the industrial revolution brought manufactured goods into everyone's lives and the computer era integrated machines (from laptops to PDAs and cell phones to iPods) into our daily regimes, connectivity is the currency of the information age. A new social contract that includes connectivity for all is not a particularly expensive endeavour – free broadband for everyone for life would cost a tiny fraction of the cost of the Wall Street bail-out and far less than the expense of one year of our war in Iraq.
Today's politicians, from municipal representatives to President-elect Barack Obama, are actively supporting broadband buildouts. Current debates over the economic stimulus package place nationwide internet infrastructure development as a key component of the intervention. An optimal free broadband system would include both wireless (for mobility and cost efficiency) and wireline (for capacity and reliability) components. And, as it turns out, two proposals are currently pending that could make free broadband connectivity for life a reality.
The first is an innovative public interest obligation on licensed spectrum. Since we already own the public airwaves (over which everything from television signals to FM radio is broadcast), as landlords, we can set the rental conditions. Every time a mobile phone company, TV broadcaster or other entity receives a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) it comes with conditions. Earlier this year, the FCC auctioned off a small portion of the 700 MHz spectrum for $19.6bn. Sadly, of that sum, zero dollars went to support free broadband. But if a small portion of spectrum auction revenues had been earmarked for free broadband for all, we would already be well on our way toward universal connectivity.
Currently, a small piece of spectrum (2155-2175 MHz) is up for license, and the conditions being proposed include providing free broadband connectivity for everyone in the US. One company in particular, M2Z Networks, has been vocally advocating to license this piece of the public airwaves with this condition. However, M2Z faces fierce competition from telecom incumbents like T-mobile, and the plan is currently stalled at the FCC.
But financial support and spectrum licensure reforms are not enough on their own. A multi-faceted solution is needed. Fuel-efficiency and car-safety standards have helped shape today's national transportation grid, but the US had to make a major public investment in the infrastructure itself. Broadband poses a similar opportunity.
Building the 21st-Century Information Superhighway is a proposal synthesised by the New America Foundation in consultation with numerous interested parties that would create a national information superhighway, providing fibre capacity to cities, towns and rural areas throughout the US. At its core, the idea is very simple: each time we rip up, repave or build a road, we should also lay fibre infrastructure along that route that anyone can use. Over the next half-decade, this initiative would create a web of connectivity – a critical new infrastructure for the digital age. Across the country, communities, internet service providers and municipalities are engaging in demand-side aggregation, but lack entree to affordable internet access, a bottleneck that this proposal solves.
Residents in places like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and St Cloud, Florida already receive free broadband. Groups like Tribal Digital Village and the CUWiN Foundation have been building free networks to serve local communities for years. There are thousands of networks all around the globe providing free connectivity to participants. In the US, we have an opportunity to implement broadband solutions that dramatically improve the lives of everyone living in the country. The question, therefore, is whether this new administration has the gumption to create a "broadband Apollo project" to maximise the potential and possibility of the information age.