The CEO of Sonic.net, a broadband provider, has a blog post with some interesting details. Here is his argument for why the US has such slow broadband.

In 1996, the US Congress kicked off the broadband revolution when it passed the Telecom Act. The 1996 Act created a level playing field for competitive carriers, and brought about widespread deployment of DSL and other broadband technologies.

Then in 2003 and 2004, the then Republican led FCC reversed course, removing shared access to essential fiber infrastructure for competitive carriers and codifying instead a policy of exclusive use and “multi-modal competition”.

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Elsewhere in the world, regulatory bodies followed the lead of the US Congress and separated essential copper and fiber infrastructure from the services and providers who used them, and the result has been amazing. In Asia and Europe, Gigabit services are becoming common, and the price paid by consumers per megabit is a tiny fraction of what we pay here at home.

The bottom-line seems to be a failure of politicians to fight for better management of shared (collective) resources. The US needs a national broadband policy that aggressively promotes true competition, based upon the separation of retail network services and wholesale network transport. Greater freedom and innovation clearly can come from shared roads, shared electric lines, shared stop-lights, shared fire-hydrants…why not shared fiber?

We must build new fiber all the way to your home, passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago.

The American government and phone companies in 1992 said they were working to put fiber to homes.

The phone companies painted a bright picture of the wonders of fiber optics and the Information Age — the latest movies available at the flick of a remote control, the Library of Congress via a personal computer and picture phones out of “2001: A Space Odyssey.

It was a good start under President Clinton, but serious impediments stood in the way. The Brookings Institute in 2002 tried to get the Bush Administration to turn up the heat and put the focus on improving broadband speeds:

The principal source of the problem is monopolistic structure, entrenched management, and political power of the ILEC and CATV sectors, worsened by major deficiencies in the policy and regulatory systems covering these industries.

The Sonic.net CEO explained above how that all turned out, as the US watches the world pass it by. One might think the following sentence would have received more attention, even from a President busy starting two wars:

Failure to improve broadband performance could reduce U.S productivity growth by 1% per year or more, as well as reducing public safety, military preparedness, and energy security.

Alas, while the US rapidly increased domestic broadband subscribers in 2001 to 2009 from 9% to 63.5% it actually has been in decline relative to the rest of the world. Today it does not even make the top ten — behind fifteen or more other countries.

Even European Mobile Broadband Penetration (e.g. smart phones) is twice that of the Americas.