What do intellectual property and copyright have to do with broadband and telecom? We sat down with USTelecom’s Kevin Rupy, director of policy development, to find out.
I’ve seen two big developments in health IT news the last couple weeks, one from the federal government and one from the private sector.
The first was the announcement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONCHIT) that it was releasing its five-year strategic plan for getting federal agencies on the same page with regard to their efforts to encourage the use of health IT resources. According to a press release from ONCHIT, the proposal will “serve as a guide to coordinate the federal government’s health IT efforts, which seek to achieve nationwide implementation of an interoperable health IT infrastructure throughout both the public and private sector.”
I saw the second in the Wall Street Journal, which included a story about a pilot program by Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente that will allow Kaiser’s 156,000 employees to securely move personal health information—data such as test results, prescriptions, and immunizations—freely between Kaiser’s online repository and Microsoft’s web-based service HealthVault. The Journal called the program “the latest in a series of efforts to allow people to better maintain control over their health records,” and “part of a push by technology companies, hospitals, insurers and the government to give patients more control of their medical information. The movement is expected to help lower health care costs by allowing consumers to make better, more-informed choices.”
Efforts like these are crucial to realizing the vast potential of the Internet and broadband technology to improve medical care and reduce health care costs in the United States. These efforts, which are focused initially on medical records, are just the tip of the iceberg though. For more on the enormous benefits of broadband in the field of health care, be sure to check out USTelecom’s fact sheet on e-health and visit NextGenWeb.org to learn about the life-enhancing benefits of broadband.
School may be out for summer, but students and teachers alike can keep the learning process going with the wide variety of educational opportunities available on the Internet. For more on how staying connected with broadband can help combat the summer learning loss, keep parents and educators in touch, and help teachers with continuing education, check out this newest edition of Broadband Now.
On Tuesday, NextGenWeb hosted a briefing dinner in Washington, DC for roughly 30 county officials from across the country that are part of the Large Urban County Caucus of the National Association of Counties. I had the pleasure of presenting an overview of the NextGenWeb site and bringing to the audience’s attention a variety of state-based initiatives to increase access to broadband throughout the country. Of course we all know about the many benefits of broadband, such as a cleaner environment and the ability to make health care more accessible and affordable, especially in rural areas, so it was a pleasure to be able to share with county officials the work that NextGenWeb and USTelecom are doing to provide information about broadband’s potential to policymakers, industry insiders, and the general public.
Did you know that 61% of travelers receive text updates on their mobile devices for flight arrival or departure status? And more than 60% of Americans will use the Internet to book travel in 2008? So what does broadband have to do with your summer vacation plans? Find out in the latest installment of our broadband news update, Broadband Now.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez gave a speech before a conference in New Orleans on communications policy. In the speech, Gutierrez echoed a number of the themes that USTelecom and NextGenWeb.org have been sounding in recent months about substantial potential of broadband to change our lives in a range of areas, including health care, education, consumer applications, and entertainment.
Specifically, Gutierrez identified the need to encourage investment in next-generation networks, noting the substantial investment broadband companies have made in infrastructure–$70 billion in North America last year alone. He put that substantial investment into perspective by citing the fact that “the cost of building the interstate highway system in today’s dollars would be about $20 billion annually over 25 years,” a fact often noted by USTelecom’s Walter McCormick in reference to the staggering investment network operators have put into our communications infrastructure. As network traffic increases with new applications, Gutierrez continued, “to keep pace, providers must develop new capacity and maintain the flexibility to manage their networks effectively and transparently.” In closing, the secretary added, “imposing regulations, throwing up barriers and creating more hurdles for industry and consumers is not the right approach… I believe it is critically important that we preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that exists for the Internet, unfettered by regulation.”
Click here to read Secretary Gutierrez’s remarks in their entirety.
In case you missed our live stream of Walter McCormick’s speech at Wednesday’s Media Institute luncheon, be sure to check it out here on our site:
At 1:15pm today, USTelecom President and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. will speak before an audience of journalists and communications executives as part of the Media Institute’s luncheon series. The Media Institute is a DC-area research foundation that specializes in communications policy. Although the luncheon is by invite only, we’ll be streaming video of the event on our website here.
Walter’s speech will touch on a range of broadband issues, including the innovative new uses for broadband for everything from enhancing our democratic process to economic stimulation to new choices in entertainment. He’ll also cover the pivotal role of private investment in keeping our communications networks strong, competitive, and efficient; the biggest threat to that investment, of course, is regulation of the Internet, another subject we expect Walter to touch on during the speech.
Be sure to tune in here at USTelecom.org to see the whole thing.
In testimony before the House Telecom Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, USTelecom President and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. urged Congress to take the time to gather the facts on broadband deployment before enacting premature legislation that could impede investment and innovation in broadband that helps protect the environment and delivers better health care and education services to consumers. Hear the testimony; read the news release or listen to the testimony.
Ever looked at the telephone poles that run down your street or alley? To the untrained eye it may just look like a jumble of cables, wires, and boxes strapped onto a utility pole. But it actually reflects the intense - and growing - competition between the cable, telephone, and CLEC companies who deliver bundled voice, video and broadband services to consumers.
Yet despite delivering nearly identical bundled services, cable, telephone and CLEC providers each pay vastly different rates to the pole owners, usually the local electric company. For example, ILEC’s can pay more than 1,400% more for pole attachments than their cable counterparts; the disparity between ILEC and CLEC rates is also high, in some instances near 900%.
But that disparity is coming under increasing scrutiny. The FCC has initiated a rulemaking proceeding to determine whether broadband attachments by all classes of providers should be subject to one uniform rate. From a policy perspective, this makes sense. Why should providers of fundamentally identical services attaching fundamentally similar devices to the poles be charged remarkably different rates?The current rate disparity between ILECs, CLECs, and cable companies puts ILECs at a substantial competitive disadvantage with regard to the prices they can offer consumers. A broad internal survey of USTelecom members, which we cited in our initial comments in the pole attachment proceeding, highlighted the significant, consistent and widespread disparity in rates charged to various providers.
Yesterday USTelecom filed reply comments in the FCC’s ongoing proceeding on pole attachments, calling for parity in rates among the providers of similar services; as the first round of comments in the proceeding showed, there’s widespread support for rate parity. Specifically, we write:
The initial comments in this docket clearly demonstrate widespread enthusiasm and support among diverse groups for a uniform, reasonable rate formula for broadband attachments. Representatives from [ILECs], cable providers, wireless providers, [CLECs] and utilities expressed their support for such an approach.
We also noted in the comments that the FCC has ample statutory authority to establish a rate formula to cover broadband attachments for all manner of providers, including ILECs; we certainly hope that the Commission acts on that authority to level the playing field between broadband providers, regardless of platform.
