Every day Reverend James Demus sees people who can’t get the Internet connection they need or want. Kids come into his south-side church, Park Manor Christian Church, and ask to do their homework on its computers because their families don’t have access to the Internet at home or can’t afford a fast connection. Other people come in because they can’t get a fast connection where they live even though they can afford it. Nine months ago the church put in a local wireless network for its own computers, which had the side effect of making the building a Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) hot spot. “We had a meeting organizing for the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March,” Demus says. “People who were there with laptops came up afterwards and asked, ‘Did you know this is a hot spot? We’ll tell our friends!’”
Complaints about the current system come down mostly to speed, cost, and availability. Dial-up Internet access is too slow if you want much more than words–you need a good book at hand if you’re downloading even a single e-mail with a picture attached. The alternative is broadband service, which, roughly speaking, refers to any Internet connection that’s faster than dial-up. It can be delivered by DSL (digital subscriber line) over copper-wire phone lines, by cable modem, by fiber optics, or by a wireless relay of signals from a hub served by one of the above. The speed of each type of connection varies, depending on such things as what computer you have and how many users are online at the same time; it ranges from as low as 200 kilobits per second to well over 100 times that fast. (At 256 kbps an average one-megabyte digital photo should take about 30 seconds to download; SBC says it guarantees a minimum of 384 kbps for its DSL service.) As a consequence, broadband doesn’t necessarily mean high-speed.
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Broadband costs more than dial-up, though providers bundle so many different services in single packages that price comparisons are hard to make. SBC’s new $14.95-a-month start-up offer, for instance, is available only to those who also buy its local phone service. Money is clearly an issue for users. A February-March 2005 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that nationwide only 48 percent of families with incomes under $30,000 used the Internet in any form, compared to 85 percent of those with incomes of $50,000 to $75,000 and 91 percent of those with incomes over $75,000. These percentages are greater than in 2002, but they continue to reflect an income-based “digital divide” that troubles people like Reverend Demus. Current corporate marketing plans won’t help much, if a November 2004 SBC presentation to investors is any indication: at the end of its “Project Lightspeed,” within three years, 90 percent of households defined as “high value” by the company will have access to high-speed fiber connections–compared to 5 percent of “low value” households.
Because the term broadband encompasses such a wide range of speeds, it’s easy to make the existing coverage sound better than it is. The Republican-dominated Federal Communications Commission has kept its standards low, allowing it to present a rosy picture of broadband availability in a September 2004 report to Congress. The agency defined broadband as any connection faster than 200 kbps, even though the International Telecommunication Union defines high-speed as connections that are at least 1,500 kbps. Even more remarkable, the FCC considers broadband “available” in a zip code if even one household there has it. (It’s not as if the agency didn’t know better; a National Research Council panel questioned the validity of using zip codes to measure availability back in 2000.) Commissioner Kevin J. Martin gushed in the report that “over 70 percent of the sparsely populated zip codes have a subscriber with ‘high-speed service.’”
Towns across America have a history of doing for themselves what private industry won’t. In the 80s Cedar Falls, Iowa, and other out-of-the-way places built their own cable-TV systems when they couldn’t get satisfactory service any other way. And decades ago rural electric cooperatives brought another technology to farmers who didn’t live close enough together to be profitable customers of private utilities.
There’s a basic philosophical reason to leave the overheated rhetoric at home, well explained by Charles Wolf Jr. of the conservative Hoover Institution. It’s in the title of his 1988 book Markets or Governments: Choosing Between Imperfect Alternatives. Neither mechanism is perfect, he writes, and neither one is self-justifying. Research has shown that in most cases private companies can provide garbage collection, water, transit, and the like more efficiently (meaning cheaper) than governments can. But there are exceptions, and there are services that private companies have declined to provide at all, almost always because they can’t make a profit on them.
It’s not clear that cities could be as disciplined. Most of the big-city efforts to provide broadband aren’t very far along, but there are already worrisome signs that they might vindicate the economists’ fears.
