We mentioned previously that Comcast was moving towards capping its residential customers at 250GB a month of Internet data. We also mentioned, repeatedly, that bandwidth caps really don’t solve the problems of network congestion or of poor latency, but if you’re going to go for a data cap, 250GB/mo seems a reasonably fair rate. Silicon Alley Insider has a rundown of exactly what 250GB means, and it actually is quite a lot of data. It misses the point, but at least it is a lot of data.

The big complaint now seems to be that Comcast has provided no way to inform the user of exactly how much of that 250GB limit they are using.

This has two major implications.

First, it encourages people who would otherwise be using the Internet normally to use it more conservatively. I don’t want to abuse the term “chilling effect,” but if your choices were to watch a movie via NetFlix’s online streaming service or ordering it on cable Pay-Per-View, you may have plenty of data to watch it, but if you don’t know how close you are to your cap, or how much a particular application consumes, you’re less likely to use the Internet. It may be a psychological block but it decreases the value of the Internet applications you use, and thus, decreases the value of the Internet connection that you lease. It also decreases the value of the “cognitive surplus,” as we’ve mentioned.

The second is simply that you can’t manage what you can’t measure – it’s as true on the residential level as it is for the largest corporate networks. Silicon Alley Insider’s numbers are, as far as we can tell, accurate, but a tech-savvy family of four could easily go over that limit, and it could be difficult to tell exactly who or what is responsible for data consumption. Dad’s teleconferencing, Mom’s downloading a Linux distro, Junior is watching a documentary on a topic for school via NetFlix, the little miss is live vodcasting, and the dog is downloading a torrent of the entire “Lassie” series. (Point is: without network visibility, everything gets blamed on the dog.)

Not providing a running tally of data “consumed” means that there’s no way to determine what actions and activities drain the most bandwidth – Was it the movie you watched last night or the marathon game session next morning? Has a neighbor been using your (unsecured or inadequately secured) wireless connection, or have you been hosting malware? How much bandwidth does playing World of Warcraft take, and how does that compare to watching YouTube, and how does THAT compare to other services like Blip.TV and Vimeo? How does a person know whether or not they’re coming close to the limit?

The MacObserver has a few tips for monitoring bandwidth consumption on a Macintosh, and there are applications that we’ve used to track bandwidth consumption on a single PC, but right now it seems that the best bet for tracking the consumption of multiple PCs to the Internet is to install a firmware like Tomato onto your home router and monitor it from there.

While we’ve talked quite a bit about what impact the Olympics may have on an enterprise network’s performance, we haven’t talked much about the performance of the NBC site hosting the live streaming of the Olympics. 

According to Jason Perlow at ZDNet, Limelight networks (which hosts the streaming videos) deployed the videos by going to the public internet by hosting the content more locally – at the ISP.  That means you’re viewing the Olympics through your ISP’s internal network, and the broader internet doesn’t even enter into the connection. 

This is smart thinking, it appears to be working, and by all measures this should be applauded.  Perhaps even duplicated – if you know that multiple employees will download the same content, local hosting on the LAN is preferable to duplicate download streams tying up the more expensive, slower WAN lines.

From the enterprise end of the equation, the fact that Limelight is delivering Olympics video more effectively just means that IT managers cannot count on their servers going down from being unable to handle the demand – IT managers still need to monitor their own networks for performance problems when a big event like the Olympics come up. 

However, it would be wrong to assume that Limelight’s strategy is the only reason why Olympic live-streaming hasn’t slowed to a trickle.

First of all, the site blocks 95.44% of visitors from accessing the content – because it limits the content only to those in the United States.  That’s a lot of people.

Secondly, the site requires Microsoft Silverlight. Most people don’t have Silverlight installed.  Some can’t even install it on their systems.  And there are certainly going to be a quite a few people who just didn’t think installing Silverlight was worth the bother to watch five minutes of Olympic footage they may be mildly interested in. 

And finally – none of the really popular sports are being streamed.  Gymnastics, Women’s Beach Volleyball, Swimming (with the exception of synchronized) and most of the track and field events aren’t available live. So you’re left with judo, fencing, and the decathlon.

So while it is a true technological wonder that the lights have stayed on and the site performs admirably – it is important to recognize that Limelight has not found a magic bullet to deal with extremely high internet video demand. 

A number of East Coast based customers of World of Warcraft have been experiencing connection delays and uncomfortable lag – and no one seems to know exactly where the problem is.

The New York Post says that Blizzard is blaming Time Warner Cable is for the problem:

"The only commonality between all the players experiencing these disconnects and extreme latency is Time Warner/Road Runner," the company said in a June 23 support post.

But the Digital Communications Director for Time Warner has said that the lags and disconnections are not on their end and points to the traceroutes as evidence.

Take a look at some of the traceroutes posted to the thread in question ... starting here, at comment #446: http://tinyurl.com/5gqe27

If you follow the commenter's posted trace results, you'll notice that it's only on TWC's Roadrunner (rr) network for the first 6 hops — with maximum response times of 10 ms. The response time jumps drastically at hop # 11 — when the trace is no longer on the Roadrunner network.

Scroll down further on the same page to comment #456, and you'll see something similar — a giant leap in lag times. However, this trace never touches our network. It starts at Verizon, goes to Alter.net at hop #5, and then jumps to ATT.net's network at hop #8. Hop #9 shows a response time of 114 ms — quite a jump from the 49ms at hop #8.

So, what’s going on?

One of the theories is that Time Warner is lying and is throttling World of Warcraft traffic, considering all the bad blood between savvy broadband users and major ISPs over BitTorrent throttling. And while I can’t prove that they’re not doing so, I have to admit that the theory doesn’t seem very likely because of the nature of World of Warcraft.

See, MMORPGs care more about latency than bandwidth. While patch downloads can be huge, the majority of the content of WoW requires low latency to provide instant responses to actions. Latency, in WoW can result in an annoyingly choppy game, and a multi-hundred millisecond delay may be the difference between slain dragon or hobbit pâté.

So from a bandwidth-saving perspective, a ISP wouldn’t have a whole lot of motive in blocking World of Warcraft or other MMORPGs.

Additionally, Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable companies were rumored to use BitTorrent throttling because both legal and copyright infringed video files competed with the standard television cable offerings of those companies. This also doesn’t seem to be the case – as while more generally, time spent playing WoW is time not spent watching TV, it’s not a specific competition. Indeed, MMORPGs are one of the key drivers for broadband speeds in the U.S., and I have trouble believing that TW or any other company would knowingly interfere with such a cash cow.

Indeed, I believe that TW might be reaching out to users to find out more about the problem because TW might be interested in solving the problem instead of losing customers to other ISPs like Verizon FIOS.

Of course, I don’t know anything – and I wish that I had some inside information to figure out what was going on and solve the problem. Not only would I look like a genius but every one of my friends who plays World of Warcraft would hoist me on their shoulders, and treat me like a Lich King for a Day. Sadly, I think that it’s going to take Blizzard and TWC together to try to triangulate why this problem is happening.

Dr. Tim Wu has recently penned an editorial to the New York Times entitled “OPEC 2.0.” which argues that we need an alternative source of bandwidth much like we need alternative sources of energy.

It’s the sort of editorial which causes other tech columnists and blog editors to immediately loathe themselves because it’s obvious in retrospect, but Dr. Wu thought of it first.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

Pointing out that the average American spends roughly the same amount of money for bandwidth of some form or another, whether on their cellphones, land-line phones, cable TV, broadband Internet, etc., as they do on heating, cooling, electricity, and gasoline, Wu makes the case that we need the data equivalent of the compost garden, rooftop solar panel, and electric scooter.

The difference, of course, is that while rooftop solar panels have recently started to be affordable on a per-wattage basis, Wu’s suggestion of “running your own fiber to your home” isn’t. Even if you did put down your own last-mile fiber, you still need some place to connect it to… the whole point is that the value of a network is equal to the number of end-points on the network, squared.

The other solutions Wu suggests: re-allocation of the EM spectrum, municipal fiber as a public utility, and increasing the amount of competition are all more practical ideas, but they require significant changes in governmental policy – the same government elected from a two party system where the two parties are both heavily influenced by broadband providers and telecommunications companies.

But Wu is not wrong in identifying a significant problem – especially since e-mail, telecommuting, and teleconferencing are all considered important ways to reduce energy expenditure. It is disheartening to believe that we’re simply switching from one artificially overpriced commodity to another.

Damn. Well, I guess there’s no way around it then. Looks like we’ll have to recreate the Internet from scratch by hooking up everyone to self-installed network connections. So what do you say, you lay the fiber if I use the backhoe?

It’s Download Day.  At 10:00 a.m. PDT, or noon, for us in Austin, Firefox 3.0 was released to the public in what the Mozilla foundation has dubbed “download day.” In fact, they’re attempting to set a Guinness World Record for “most downloads in a 24 hour period.” 

So, it was a bit of a concern to us because with all those people downloading Web browsers, there would be sure to be traffic spikes on our network. But the “Download Day” promotion is such a huge success that Mozilla is having trouble keeping their own server up. 

At 10:16 a.m. PDT, I can see a “The server at www.spreadfirefox.com is taking too long to respond” error.  Mozilla.org is also unable to resolve. 

At 10:30 a.m. PDT, it’s still not connecting, and I decide to stop hitting refresh and go and eat lunch. Mmm.  Roast Beef. 

At 11:30 a.m. PDT, Spreadfirefox.com is still not resolving, but Mozilla.org does.  That doesn’t last, however, as I go to download Firefox, I get a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error.   I bring up a copy of “Waiting for Godot” in another browser window.

It is 12:00 noon on the Pacific.  Spreadfirefox.com is still not resolving. 

12:30 p.m. PDT.  Still not working.  I clean off my work desk, something I’ve been putting off for a wh—ew, is that mayonnaise?  (I hope that’s mayonnaise.)

1:00 p.m. PDT. No Firefox, but My desk is now clean.  (My closet is now dangerous.)  Time to catch up on my RSS feeds to find out if there are any interesting leads that I can investigate. Hmm.  Wine 1.0 is out, but that really doesn’t have a lot to do with network performance.  Reddit seems have problems with Firefox too.  But somebody has to be getting the browser – there’s over 8000 downloads a minute according to the counting tracker.  Wait.  Some users report the counts running backward… what, are people uploading it back?

1:45 p.m. PDT. Aha!  Finally.  The page resolves and I begin my download… and it redirects me to Firefox 2.0.0.14.  Great.

1:55 p.m. PDT. I download Opera 9.5.

2:00 p.m. PDT. Mozilla’s page finally shows a link to Firefox 3.0 – but still shows the logo for Firefox 2.  The 7.1 MB download starts at around 50kBytes/s – which is pretty lame for the usual 700kBytes/s I can get when I download from work. 

2:15 p.m. I install Firefox 3.0 and launch it.  It’s nice.  It’s certainly more responsive and uses less memory.  However, my Tab Mix Plus extension isn’t compatible, and furthermore, there’s no option to undo closed tabs.  All in all, a disappointment – if it were a restaurant, it would be infamous for slow service and bad food.

Leaving aside the whole “Undo Closed Tabs” issue, you would think that an organization actively trying to beat the world record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period might, you know, be prepared enough to make sure the servers don’t go down?

Additionally; Mozilla has been promoting “Download Day” for some time now, so it makes sense for IT departments to be prepared for the onslaught of downloads coming into the network from users upgrading their PCs to the latest version of the browser – and keep track of the impact that traffic has on the user experience for more mission-critical apps.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Ars Technica reports that the National Institutes of Health released a study which show that wireless-phone only households are increasing – currently 15.8 percent of households. 

But that’s just part of it – other consumers are switching to VoIP services – gobbling up another 13.8 percent of U.S. households. 

There are certainly economic factors which result in this change - me, I cancelled my landline phone service when I realized I was paying less on a month-to-month basis on my cellphone than I was for a service I barely used.  Since then, I’ve moved around a lot (seven times in the past five years) and keeping the same cellphone instead of canceling and re-enabling service makes a hell of a lot of sense. 

But still – three out of ten consumers?  This is a major shift – and one that’s likely to continue as cellphone and VoIP quality gets better. 

Of course, there will be more demand for VoIP networking in the future – and with it, a need to monitor VoIP quality of experience.  But more than that is the idea that there is an entire infrastructure of phone lines – stretching from sea to shining sea and beyond – that connect the last mile to the local phone exchange. 

It seems like such a waste. 

But wait!  DSL service only uses the 25kHz and above part of the spectrum – 4kHz is reserved for voice.   If landlines are repurposed ONLY for data, with VoIP being another application on the all-data network, that could free up the 4kHz spectrum currently being used.  Maybe we can use that 0-4kHz band for broadband to rural homes – which can clearly get 4kHz data if they can get a phone call. 

This is especially important for rural broadband penetration.  The longer the distance to the exchange, the lower the quality of high bandwidth exchanges – this is why your DSL service gets slower the further you are from your local phone exchange.  But the 4kHz currently used for voice can travel much greater distances – it won’t be as fast as the DSL available in the cities but repurposing the 4kHz bandwidth from voice to data might make a huge difference to getting some minimal broadband to the most rural parts of the world.

Now, this won’t make a whole lot of difference to a person living in the city – DSL works by dividing that 25kHz-and-up portion of the spectrum into 4kHz chunks, each one connecting with a speed equivalent of a modem.  It is the multitude of these channels – hundreds in most cases – that makes DSL speed possible.  Repurposing the broadband of 0-25kHz would result in only six additional channels.  Assigning two for upload and four for download, you’d have speeds of around 14.4kBytes/s (or 115.9kbits/s) upload and 28.8kBytes/s (231.3kbits/s) download.  That’s not much of a speed boost. 

Still, if you’ve been plodding along on a “56.6k” modem, at speeds of 7.2kBytes/s, this would be like an oasis in the desert.  And what about those phone calls?  Well, if you make the same phone calls with VoIP that you were with the standard 0-4kHz landline, it would only take about 20.8kbits/s using the G.723.1 codec – that still leaves you with 80% of your broadband capacity when on the phone – and 100% of your broadband when you’re off it.  For someone whose only current Internet connectivity choice is a modem, currently getting 16% of a theoretical data capacity – and 0% when you’re on the phone – that’s a major improvement.   

What do you think?  It seems reasonable, but there might be a flaw in my math – I did only pass Calc I on my third try.  Let me know if you have something to share in our comments section.

We’ve mentioned numerous times about broadband penetration and speed lagging behind countries more rural and less populated – in other words, countries the U.S. has no excuse lagging behind.

Ars Technica recently put out an article detailing what differences in national broadband policy exist that have enabled other nations to surpass the U.S.’s broadband capability. Japan and France have local loop unbundling – that allows for more competition among ISPs.  They also both deploy fiber instead of copper even if it doesn’t show an immediate profit, and competing ISPs are rolling out new fiber infrastructure instead of just leasing lines. 

Japan, France, Sweden, and Canada all treat broadband as a “core infrastructure element” – that is, it is treated as vital to the functioning of the national economy as good roads, bridges, tunnels, and electrical grids.

In all fairness, the U.S. can claim the same thing.  The U.S. may have no broadband policy, may be looking to traffic shaping to solve problems that would be better addressed by more fiber rollouts (oh, and by the way, there’s a new $800,000 deep packet inspection device on the market today to help service providers monitor and shape traffic), and may be relying on increasingly obsolete technologies – but at least we treat it the same as we do our roads, bridges, tunnels, and electrical grids. 

Which is to say, not very well at all.  The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States infrastructure a “D” in 2005, down from a score of “D+” in 2003 – and to fix those problems would require $1.6 trillion over five years.  Since then, not much has been done, according to this CBS video reposted on RawStory.com.

Instead, the government is considering plans to lease highways to private companies – using tolls to provide a “free market” solution to the infrastructure problem – but which will ultimately be a government sanctioned private monopoly over certain sections of blacktop. It is difficult to see how this would improve infrastructure, rather than simply allowing private companies to charge the maximum people will pay for the minimum infrastructure service people will put up with.

So, as far as treating broadband infrastructure like the rest of America’s infrastructure, it seems we already do that.  But what needs to be clear is that broadband infrastructure is infrastructure – that is, it is just as important for the rural area to get good broadband as it was for them to get good roads back during the Eisenhower administration. 

In a macabre way, this limited broadband is good for vendors; if broadband was plentiful there wouldn’t be so great a demand for WAN Optimization tools, for example.  Sure, WAN Optimization is a good idea anyway but it is the high cost of bandwidth that spurs demand forward.  It is becoming harder to maintain performance not just because of the various new demands on the network but also because the infrastructure across the country is simply inadequate – thus the demand for network performance monitoring tools.  Increasing bandwidth doesn’t always solve the network problem but insufficient bandwidth always creates one.

The Network Systems research group of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems recently published a cool little online tool called Glasnost. It tests for BitTorrent traffic manipulation.

I’m not providing a link to the tool mostly because the institute – recently popular from Slashdot – seems to have been hijacked by malware that is causing pop-up windows to appear. Some of the pop-ups are pornographic – so I wouldn’t go checking out the site at work. Still, the basic idea is pretty damn cool.

In addition to testing for BitTorrent blocking, you can also get a pretty accurate bandwidth and latency reading. I have no idea if this program can be modified to keep WAN service providers honest and get a real measure of latency on a WAN, but the source code has been released to the public and anyone can use it.

But most people will just use it to check to see if their ISP does any BitTorrent traffic manipulation.

There is a bit of irony to the project as well; Glasnost is named after the well known economic and political reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and de facto last ruler of the Soviet Union. He opened up Russia to criticism from within.

The Planck Institute’s Glasnost has been gathering data on which ISPs are blocking or throttling BitTorrent transmissions. A copy of a map on which that data was plotted is found below – the black dots are tested connections that have no throttling, the red dots are tested connections that have throttling. I think I’ll just let the map speak for itself. (Click on the map for a larger version)

The raw numbers on the site confirm what is on the map. 889 total ISPs were tested. 14 of those had some sort of BitTorrent blocking. 10 of those were located in the United States. That’s 10 out of 199 – or a little over 5%.

The only other countries that have any sort of BitTorrent blocking ISPs are Canada (1 out of 99), Ireland, (1 out of 7), Malaysia (1 out of 2), and Singapore (1 out of 6). All the countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, and tested, came out with no blocking whatsoever.

Glasnost seems to be an appropriate name.

Editorial
by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Today (May 6, 2008) the House Telecommunications subcommittee is meeting to debate network neutrality legislation; the ramifications of which are likely to be far reaching and quite controversial no matter what the conclusions are.

Neither this blog’s editorial stance nor the position of NetQoS is to endorse or denounce any particular piece of network neutrality legislation. But that does not mean that there are not deeper issues that the debate over Net Neutrality is part of, nor does that mean that where aren’t some more fundamental truths that we cannot agree on.

Richard Stallman at MIT
--Credit: Sam Ogden

The only problem with this is that this isn’t a software development blog – we deal with networking. So I wrote an essay to him about what I felt were the moral issues behind the network neutrality debate – something I personally feel has a moral component.

I’m printing some of our conversation below. Now, this is not a debate in the classic sense – we agree on many things and disagree on others; and what I am trying to do is not so much to convince our readership of a position, but rather to convince our readership to think about this issue philosophically, and to join into our conversation – whether via the comments section here or elsewhere.

EDITOR BRIAN BOYKO: …Just as you believe that free software is a moral right, I happen to think that effective and efficient networks are a free speech issue. Throughout history, improvements in the quality of life – whether through technology or social activism – have been proportional to the abilities of people to communicate. Europe suffered 1000 years of the dark ages until Arabic scrolls allowed them to recapture the lost wisdom of the Greeks. Technological development booms with every innovation in communication; the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet.

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system; I believe that Metcalfe’s law can be applied to humanity as a whole – that the value of us as a species is proportional to the square of the number of us who are in communication with each other.

For these reasons I believe that open and effective communication is a fundamental human right. Now, as I believe communication is a human right, the only limit one should have on their ability to communicate should be when that communication harms someone else’s right to communicate.

RICHARD STALLMAN’S RESPONSE: It is hard for me to accept that, as stated, because it would imply that until the 1990s all governments were acting unjustly no matter what they did. That cannot be justice.

I think it that the term "human right" can only properly apply to matters of not hurting other people. Thus, it is abuse of language to speak of the "human right" to have food to eat. I think states have a duty to provide food to the hungry, and more generally, to operate a welfare system to help the poor and disadvantaged. Perhaps we have reached the point where wealthy states also have a duty to provide broadband to everyone. But that is a different kind of duty from that of respecting rights.

It is easy to imagine a situation in which there is insufficient supply of food for everyone to eat. But there cannot be an insufficient supply of freedom of speech to go around.

BRIAN BOYKO: But bandwidth is a limited resource. It is entirely possible for some types of traffic to overwhelm others, and this is not an exaggeration; at NetQoS we see this happening on corporate networks all the time.

Right now, Network Neutrality proponents believe in the idea of a “dumb” network. Yet, this does not reflect the realities of the situation; if UDP traffic (VoIP, Gaming, Streaming Live Media) is on the same pipe as TCP traffic without some sort of limitations on the traffic in place, the UDP traffic will eventually overwhelm the TCP traffic entirely, blocking it out.

The scenario that Net Neutrality opponents trot out of heavy users degrading the quality of communication for light users is entirely plausible. Overhyped, to be sure, but plausible.

On the other hand, this does not in any way make the anti-neutrality position in any way correct. Neutrality detractors often argue for solutions that are worse than the problem. Some want to block certain types of traffic – BitTorrent is seen as the perpetual scapegoat – others want to limit the amount of data that people can download, or charge them more for more data. But data is unlimited. Given enough time and enough reliability, I could download a GNU/Linux distribution over a 2800 baud modem. Data is not the issue; bandwidth – or the amount of data that anyone could download at any one time – is.

RICHARD STALLMAN: I think it is legitimate to give small transfers priority over big ones. I do not understand why UDP traffic would overwhelm TCP traffic, but I have no objection to giving TCP priority over UDP if that is useful -- because anybody could, feasibly, use either one to talk with you.

I also see nothing wrong with charging you as a client more for more bandwidth.

What I object to is that your ISP privileges some sites over others when you, as a client, access them -- either explicitly, or indirectly as a consequence of something else. If your ISP does that, it is not working honestly for you.

As mentioned above; this is not so much an endorsement of any position as a hope that we can start talking about these philosophical issues openly. (If you have any problem with the CAPTCHA, feel free to e-mail me directly at brian.boyko@netqos.com and I will be happy to publish your comments.)

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released their 2008 report comparing countries around the world in broadband access, speed, and price; the United States comes in at 15 out of 30. 

Every year since 2001, the United States has fallen further behind in broadband access.  We are now being beaten by Australia.

Last month, we released an editorial entitled: “U.S. falling behind in broadband; enough is enough.” We ended that column with the following words:

What I’d like to see are articles talking about how Americans are trying to solve the broadband problem – not articles dwelling further about how bad things have gotten. 

I don’t have any panaceas, but if you know of something – or have an idea, feel free to leave a comment below.

The report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation actually does propose a number of solutions to increase broadband adoption in the U.S.  Here are some takeaways from the report:

• The United States poor performance is roughly about 25 percent to blame on poor policy, about 75 percent on environmental issues like the distribution of homes in suburbia and exurbia, as well as the very long copper loop lengths that such an arrangement necessitate.


• The culture of Wall Street also plays a large part – Japan’s NTT faces less pressure to continually post quarterly profits; as such they can plan on a more long-term basis.  The United States focus on quarterly performance discourages investment in infrastructure that will not show a profit in 90 days.


• Support at the highest levels of government for broadband correlates positively to broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing.


• Competition between providers both inter and intra-modal usually correlates positively to  broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing – but not always.


• There is an upper ceiling on broadband penetration in the U.S.; as only two thirds of American households have computers, the maximum broadband penetration can be is 66%. 

And here are some of the recommendations:

To encourage the development of broadband infrastructure (supply) in the United States, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take the following steps:

1. Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.

2. Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks.

3. Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available.

4. Reform the federal Universal Service Fund program to extend support for rural broadband to all carriers, and consider providing the funding through a reverse auction mechanism.

5. Fund a national program to co-fund state-level broadband support programs, such as Connect Kentucky or North Carolina e-NC Authority.

6. Promote the widespread use of a national, user-generated, Internet-based broadband mapping system that would track location, speed, and price of broadband.

7. State and local governments should take action to make it easier for providers to deploy broadband services, including making it easier to access rights-of-way.

To encourage the growth of consumer demand for broadband, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take these steps:

8. Support initiatives around the nation to encourage broadband usage and digital literacy.

9. Fund a revitalized Technology Opportunities Program, with a particular focus on the development of nationally scalable Web-based projects that address particular social needs, including law enforcement, health care, education, and access for persons with disabilities.

10. Exempt broadband Internet access from federal, state, and local taxes.

11. Support new applications, including putting more public content online, improving e-government, and supporting telework, telemedicine, and online learning programs.

What are your thoughts on these recommendations?