The Need for Speed: A New Framework for Telecommunications Policy for the 21st Century

The Enormous Benefits of a Broadband World

5 The Enormous Benefits of a Broadband World 59 Initially, the Internet promoted decentralization, by allowing people or firms physically located anywhere on the globe to communicate with each other and to the masses of other people who were likewise linked. For that very reason, some predicted that it would lead to the “death of distance”—to a world in which people could work remotely without having to come into a physical central location and in which, by implication, cities or highdensity suburbs would become a thing of the past. That future has never been realized because face-to-face, in-person interactions remain important and therefore so do the places where people work. Indeed, the cutting edge of workspace design today is the “officeless” office, or large rooms without walls that maximize the random contacts that people have with one another and that tend to spark new ideas. Meanwhile, cities are not dead. To the contrary, innovative “ecosystems” remain as important as or even more important than ever, even though people are using the latest means of modern communications—wireless phones and tablets and video-conferencing—intensely and with increasing frequency , as the futurists correctly predicted. What they did not forecast is that although the Internet has facilitated some decentralization, it has also promoted the very opposite—centralization—at the same time. Whereas only a few years ago it was typical for users to access the Internet only to find information or to send data that were stored on their computers , today users are migrating to the “cloud”—a deliberately fuzzy term referring to the web of servers located anywhere and everywhere that store data and software that formerly resided on the hard disks of personal computers or workstations or on smaller storage devices (such as floppy disks and, later, thumb drives). In this new world, communications and computing have melded so closely together that they are difficult to distinguish from one another. We are approaching the day when it will feel as if everyone is plugged into one big computer, with personal “plugs” (PCs, tablets, phones, and surely even more amazing computing/communication devices to come) linked together by the wired and wireless connections of the modern Internet. The communications network has literally become the central nervous system for the global economy and society. All of these developments have had a huge impact on our daily lives. Whether we are in school, at work, trying to find a job, or retired but exploring the world at home through our computer or phone, we are connected to each other and to society at large through the Internet. What is true for individuals is even more compelling for businesses, which rely on the Internet to maintain contact not just with customers but also with suppliers and service providers. To be sure, the Internet has its dark side, too: it makes it easier for criminals and terrorists to wreak havoc on the rest of civilized society. But it gives the “good guys”—domestic 60 The Enormous Benefits of a Broadband World police and armed forces—the ability to track them down and ideally to prevent at least some nefarious acts from occurring in the first place. Digitization, meanwhile, is not only changing communications but revolutionizing services (think outsourcing), and it is beginning to change manufacturing through software-guided customized 3D printing of an increasing array of products and components. Analyses of large bodies of data will eventually produce medical breakthroughs, just as retailers, search engines, and social networks are using “Big Data” to refine marketing pitches to consumers. The benefits of all of this connectivity depend critically on the speed with which bits of information are transmitted to all those connected to the network. The faster that these bits travel, the greater the number of applications or uses of the broadband network that innovators will develop. We have seen this phenomenon play out as computing speeds have continued to increase and as mobile devices that connect to the Internet become more powerful. Jobs and Economic Output Policies that encourage more deployment of next-generation broadband will be especially beneficial for the telecommunications equipment manufacturers that will build these networks. In addition to equipment manufacturing, other sectors of the economy will thrive because general economic activity is positively linked to telecommunications investment, just as the deployment of first-generation broadband created jobs and increased general economic output. Crandall, Lehr, and...