So much so, in fact, that it could eclipse consumer demand in the future, said John Horrigan, Consumer Research Director of the FCC's National Broadband Plan.
Before joining the FCC's broadband task force, Horrigan was associate director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. He's responsible for directing most of the research about broadband adoption that has been cited over and over since the FCC began the process of developing a national plan.
"Machine-to-machine will be increasingly important," Horrigan said yesterday at the Brookings Institution during a panel about broadband innovation and investment.
"Today video is driving the demand" for consumers, he said. "In the future, it will be machine-to-machine that will have tremendous demands on the infrastructure."
He talked about the challenges of getting seniors online. Everyone has a grandmother who doesn't see the point of getting broadband and learning how to use it, he said.
"She may not want broadband but her healthcare provider may want her to have broadband" for telemedicine purposes, he said. "Digital literacy becomes a key part of the equation for some of the more nifty applications people are talking about."
"The demands of telemedicine today will be the demands of regular consumers in five years," Horrigan added.
Robert Shapiro, senior policy fellow at Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, promoted the idea that Internet service providers should be allowed to adopt premium pricing plans to help pay for the investment needed to build out universal broadband.
"The current model is a fixed monthly fee regardless of how much bandwidth you consume," he said. "If we maintain the current model and pass along that cost, what we'll see is a persistent digital divide."
That's because the "bandwidth hogs" are typically more willing to spend more money to get more capacity every month. Those high-paying customers will help subsidize the infrastructure buildout. And lower-income consumers can benefit from less-expensive services that offer less bandwidth.
Shapiro will be talking about this issue again on Friday at 10 a.m. in Capitol Building Room HC-6. (Here's his report released in August.)
Darrell West, director of governance studies at Brookings, who moderated the panel, responded to questions about "open-access" regulations.
It was at Brookings that Julius Genachowski laid out his plans for net neutrality regulations in a September speech.
"Even the position of the FCC seems pretty complicated," he said. "He endorsed open access, but he laid out caveats. ISPs should be able to engage in some form of network management. What everybody's watching now is how broadly or narrowly that concept is going to be defined."
"And he seemed, near the end of his speech, to be open to premium pricing," West said. "He seemed to be open, at least in the abstract, to offering different pricing levels to people using different amounts of bandwidth."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Kim Hart
Quelle/Source: The Hill, 11.11.2009
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