The FCC has posted it’s workshop “Review and Discussion of Broadband Deployment Research” along with the archived video.  Richard Bennett posted a good summary of the workshop.  The workshop debated the Berkman Broadband study and the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information CITI broadband report. Harold Feld and Thomas Hazlett replied to Yochai Benkler who led the Berkman study. Lee Rainie and Robert C Atkinson authored and presented the CITI broadband report.

Benkler didn’t address many of the big criticisms of his report such as the fact that the report failed to do what the FCC asked them to do or that it incorrectly portrayed Japan to make a case for unbundling.  He did address one of my criticisms that real-world Akamai data should have been used instead of OECD rankings which relied on advertised performance, but Benkler insists that it doesn’t invalidate the original report because the Akamai data doesn’t change the national broadband rankings.  Some of my other criticisms were completely ignored.

But Benkler still misses the point that rankings are silly and arbitrary. For one thing, the Akamai data shows that there is only a small difference of 28% between #5 rank Sweden and #18th ranked United States.  And even Japan’s ultra-advanced broadband infrastructure is less than 2 times faster than the United States and not the 9.3 times that the Berkman study touted.  So while there may be a superficial difference, the functional difference isn’t significant.  The OECD rankings used in the Berkman report misrepresented the functional difference in broadband between the various nations.

The other big problem with these broadband rankings are the arbitrary geographic boundaries.  Had we compared the 50 states of the United States against the 27 states of the European Union, the United States would have looked better than Europe.  Compare the individual American States against the European Union as a whole and America looks good.  But compare individual European Union States against the U.S. as a whole and Europe looks good.

There’s also more evidence that all that last-mile bandwidth in Japan is of limited use because the cost of server bandwidth is much higher than the United States.  As a result, the fidelity and quality of on-demand video content over broadband in Japan seems to be worse than the United States because of a lack of cheap server-side bandwidth.