The National Broadband Plan’s Adoption Rates and Operational Costs

May 5th, 2010

Shameless self-promotion time!

For the past couple of months, among other areas of work, I have been consulting for the Federal Communications Commission on the National Broadband Plan. If you’re unfamiliar, the executive summary abides:

Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a National Broadband Plan to ensure every American has “access to broadband capability.” Congress also required that this plan include a detailed strategy for achieving affordability and maximizing use of broadband to advance “consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety and homeland security, community development, health care delivery, energy independence and efficiency, education, employee training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation and economic growth, and other national purposes.”

On April 28, 2010, the FCC released their very first technical paper on the National Broadband Plan. It was the first in a series of followup documents that the FCC promised in their initial March 15 outline. These followups are intended to address, among other things, the details! As in, who’s unserved? How big is the broadband availability gap? What assumptions were made during the process? And eventually: how much is it going to cost? And how do we decide how to divvy up the cash to stimulate building? LOTS of questions.

My part in all this was twofold. First, I helped fashion the recurring and nonrecurring expenses that would be incurred on operating a broadband network, be it cable, wireless, or wireline technology. And second, I helped to develop the broadband adoption curves that would predict take rates for every census block in the country. No small feat!

The full technical paper can be found on the the FCC website – it’s listed under “The Broadband Availability Gap” section. The take rate stuff starts on page 45. My team at Duff & Phelps gets called out for their hard work as well. And to cap off the love, this shows up at the end: “Special Thanks to Arnab Das and Ruben Miranda who, in addition to their work on the wireless modeling and take-rate analysis, respectively, also contributed directly to the related sections of this paper.”

Obviously both of these things are small parts in a much larger effort driven by the FCC and their primary modeling team. But as far as my contributions are concerned, I’m really proud of them.

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