Broadband aspiration: our missing link..?

In the dog days of July and August, my holiday reading was largely dominated by stories from the US about initiatives to facilitate municipal broadband projects, and the corresponding attempts by incumbents (and state laws) to suppress these - see here, for example.  The debate has become so heated that even content providers have felt obliged to muscle in.  Netflix, for instance, has lobbied the FCC in these resonant terms: 

“[a] single fiber-optic strand the diameter of a human hair can carry 101.7 terabits of data per second, enough to support nearly every Netflix subscriber watching content in HD at the same time.” When municipalities harness that technology to extend new opportunities to new communities, federal and state laws should encourage that initiative, or at the very least, get out of the way. The Commission can and should take a hard look at state laws that facilitate the efforts of incumbents to artificially constrain broadband availability and capacity.  “[B]roadband is not a finite resource. No statute—state or federal—should make it one". 

The American system of local government is clearly very different to ours but I wonder whether we couldn’t learn some lessons from their predicament.  Recall, for instance, the fiasco in Birmingham when BT and Virgin successfully thwarted the plans by the City Council to provide ‘ultrafast’ broadband connectivity to businesses in some previously unserved areas of the city. That situation seems to me very similar to the battles now being fought across a number of metropolitan areas in the US. Indeed, this summer’s report by the City Growth Commission had some harsh words to say about the UK environment for state-aided broadband investment in urban areas, e.g. 

“Government should commission a comprehensive review on how our current and future needs for digital infrastructure can be met, especially in the face of strict EU State Aid rules and a highly concentrated high-speed broadband market in which major players such as BT and Virgin can constrain supply and market competition.” 

Susan Crawford, Visiting Professor at the Harvard Law School, and an arch critic of the US cable incumbents, believes the answer is enhanced regulation - not at the federal level but state regulation in the hands of local mayors.  These mayors would act as digital champions, as some have done already, thus fostering competition between metropolitan areas for their levels of broadband access - interview here. 

Hard to say whether a comparable model might work in this country but there has to be some risk that our cities’ broadband infrastructure – now and for future upgrades- could be caught between competition/overbuild policies at the macro level and bottom-up, infill projects at the very local, micro kevel.