"Government
role in promoting the future of telecommunications industry and
broadband deployment." Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science
and Transportation. United States Senate, October 1, 2002.
Reed Hundt, Former Chairman, Federal Communication Commission.
"A
next generation if universal broadband network will cost tens of
billions of dollars. But we know consumers will pay for the network,
over time, if the monthly user price is affordable and the applications
are attractive, and everyone is on the network. Therefore, to some
extent, this network, like the transportation and communication
services, since the telegraph and the first macadam roads, simply has to
be build in order to attract traffic, as opposed to waiting for unmet
demand to build before the network is build. After all, did America
wait to build roads until after every garage had a car? Not at all;
even while Ford's cars were pouring out of factories in the 1920s,
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover used government leadership to build
a network of roads linking every town and city in the country.
Similarly, even while computer processing speeds continue to double
every couple of years and Internet applications consist of more and more
bits all the time, we need to extend and expand the underlying
communications networks so that they have the reach and capacity to the
advantage both of processing speeds and the complexity of volume of
Internet applications.
If
the government will help finance the network, in time it will recover
the cost, directly from the feeds paid by costumers, and indirectly from
the gains in technology and productivity that will be part of the
economy.
...
Technology
advances, and we can either use the combined forces of the government,
and the marketplace to make technological innovation available to all
Americas, or others will take the lead."