After what seems like years of consumers begging, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has finally agreed to review the United States national startegy for broadband access, but will it be enough?

While the rest of the world has been zooming past the United States in terms of the broadband speeds available to the their citizens, the United States has lacked any sort of national broadband initiative.  The government is now setting aside $7.2 billion to work on the National Broadband Plan (Adobe Reader link), but the initial parameters are a bit disheartening.

From now until February 17, 2010, the commission will be collecting data from various sources including the public about what parts of the country are underserviced by broadband access.  So we are already looking at over studying the needs of the country to death, but the other hurdle is that the FCC currently defines “broadband” as 768 Kbps, a speed so slow that you can barely even watch online video with it.

The median speed of broadband in the United States is currently below 5 Mbps, but according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), other countries are already light years ahead of us.  Japan averages 63 Mbps, South Korea runs at 49 Mbps and just this week Australia began work on bringing 100 Mbps to most of their residents with a minimum of 12 Mbps to the rest.  So while we “study” the problem, the rest of the world continues to excel past us, and we may end up aiming for speeds they were at years ago, setting ourselves even further behind.

According to the FCC’s own press release, these are the four initial goals of the study:

• The most effective and efficient ways to ensure broadband access for all Americans
• Strategies for achieving affordability and maximum utilization of broadband infrastructure and services
• Evaluation of the status of broadband deployment, including the progress of related grant programs
• How to use broadband to advance consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety and homeland security, community development, health care delivery, energy independence and efficiency, education, worker training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation, and economic growth, and other national purposes.

The problems already bother me.  Where is the statement of setting a national target speed?  What about setting a target price consumers can expect to spend instead of this all over the board pricing we currently suffer under?  Monthly bandwidth caps?  Net nuetrality?  For now this sounds an awful lot like “We’ll form a group to study the study that studied the other study…”, you get the picture.

At least they are doing something, but it certainly doesn’t sound very promising at this point, and especially not for the $7.2 billion they plan to spend on it.