On 28 June, Sen. Brownback and Wyoming Republican Senator Mike Enzi introduced the Broadband Deployment and Competition Enhancement Act of 2001, S1126. The bill will relieve the regional Bell companies, known as incumbent local exchange carriers or ILECs in the bill, of the regulations imposed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Those regulations prevent ILECs from offering long-distance voice or data services, thus cutting them off from business outside their traditional geographic markets.
The generic term broadband access used in the Brownback-Enzi and Tauzin-Dingell bills, apply to a number of advanced and high-speed data services, such as Digital Subscriber Lines (DSLs), Internet access over cable TV, and satellite links. While dial-up lines normally top out at 56 thousand bits per second (56 Kbs) and sometimes require a time-consuming dialing routine, broadband access offers lines many times faster and without the access delays. Making broadband access easier and less expensive promises significant new benefits to businesses and consumers in greater productivity and new services.
Rural users targeted
Brownback brings a new angle to the debate, namely the need to serve rural populations, a concern to elected officials in states like Kansas and Wyoming, the homes of the bill’s Senate cosponsors. Brownback, in a speech given on the Senate floor, said to equate the local market with the broadband market, as done in the 1996 regulations, effectively cuts off high-speed access to rural areas.
Brownback noted, “Broadband facilities being deployed by ILECs throughout our cities and towns require billions of dollars of capital investment in new infrastructure that must be added to the existing telephone network. The sparse populations of rural communities already diminish the return on infrastructure investment so that, when combined with local telephone market regulations, ILEC broadband deployment has not proven to be cost effective.”
He cited the community of Wellington, Kansas (population 10,000) get its only broadband services from a small unregulated telecommunications provider, while Southwestern Bell has not deployed broadband lines. Brownback said that the regional Bell companies serve about 65 percent of the rural telephone lines.
Just so rural areas do not get forgotten in the debate, Brownback and Enzi introduced S 1127, The Rural Broadband Deployment Act of 2001. The bill exempts rural areas from regulations imposed on advanced telecommunications services, defined as any service providing packet-switching or successor technologies, and at speeds not less than 384 kilobits per second.
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