Disappointing That Broadband Won't Support Rich Media Communication

It as pityful that broadband is defined as an universal services to allow one to surf, to use VoIP and to gather information. Video and rich media communication are regarded optional. An appalling conservative vision of what broadband should provide in an era of new ways of communication and collaboration ...

"The question of how to define broadband has long been a challenging one for many proponents of universal broadband. When asked last summer at what speed Obama’s administration might define broadband, Blair Levin, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus who is now a key member of Obama’s transition team focused on broadband, told Telephony, “Part of it depends on what feature sets happen in the future. I don’t think we’ll define universal service as that necessary to carry Cisco’s telepresence, for example. But we may get to a level of video; who knows. I think there’s a growing consensus that universal service, as it is today, ought to [allow one to] be capable of doing Web-surfing, VoIP, information gathering – those kinds of things. And we want that to be available in roughly 100% of the country. And we’d like to achieve penetration rates similar to what we’ve achieved in voice.”

Source: TelephonyOnline