Viewpoint

Here, a monthly perspective from Consumers Union on the latest challenges—and possible solutions—facing U.S. consumers today. See archived letters.

Fighting for broadband

Robert Berger can see the world headquarters of Apple and Cisco from his house in Saratoga, Calif., an upscale community that looks out over the tech empire of Silicon Valley.

But when it comes to getting high-speed broadband service, Berger's house might just as well be in a remote desert. The companies that hold franchises to provide fat data pipes to Berger and his neighbors in Saratoga—AT&T and Comcast—have no current plans to do so. The wireless service he has is pokey and about twice as expensive as some true broadband services in wired areas.

Ironically, his situation is even worse at his office in Mountain View, where he's a chief technology officer. "We have to be very careful with any large files or we will choke the connection," he says. "It makes much of our work very difficult and slow."

For millions of Americans the prospects for getting true broadband anytime soon are even bleaker. Many regions are either too rural or too low-income to provide the financial incentives to entice private companies to invest in building high-speed broadband networks.

The Federal Communications Commission recently released a National Broadband Plan to provide a road map for a public-policy role in connecting rural and low-income households across the nation. But cable giant Comcast wants the federal government to stay out of broadband policy, and in April it won a controversial court case against the FCC.

So the agency is taking another tack. Currently broadband service providers are considered information services and are not clearly subject to common carriage and other rules that apply to traditional landline phone services. But by reclassifying the transmission component of broadband as a telecom service, the FCC can execute the recommendations of the Broadband Plan that will help connect underserved and unserved regions of the country, spur more competition to curb subscription costs, and ensure that the Internet continues to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

Consumers Union believes the FCC must have the clear authority to protect consumers' rights to choose where they go on the Web, what they buy, what they upload, and how they spend their time online. The devil will be in the details of the reclassification order the FCC issues, and the devil will be busy in the next few months. Through reclassification, we believe the FCC is taking a sound approach to a serious challenge.