Article in Broadband and related issues in WaPo today.

[TayTay]

Now, who will chair the Senate committee about these issues?

America's Internet Disconnect

By Michael J. Copps
Wednesday, November 8, 2006; Page A27

SNIP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701230.html

The FCC needs to start working to lower prices and introduce competition. We must start meeting our legislative mandate to get advanced telecommunications out to all Americans at reasonable prices; make new licensed and unlicensed spectrum available; authorize "smart radios" that use spectrum more efficiently; and do a better job of encouraging "third pipe" technologies such as wireless and broadband over power lines. And we should recommend steps to Congress to ensure the FCC's ability to implement long-term solutions.

We need a broadband strategy for America. Other industrialized countries have developed national broadband strategies. In the United States we have a campaign promise of universal broadband access by 2007, but no strategy for getting there. With less than two months to go, we aren't even within shouting distance.

The solution to our broadband crisis must ultimately involve public-private initiatives like those that built the railroad, highway and telephone systems. Combined with an overhaul of our universal service system to make sure it is focusing on the needs of broadband, this represents our best chance at recapturing our leadership position.

It seems plain enough that our present policies aren't working. Inattention and muddling through may be the path of least resistance, but they should not and must not represent our national policy on this critical issue.

The writer is a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission.

Now, I wonder what the new Chair of that sub-comm that deals with this stuff thinks about those issues. I wonder if there was a lesson in NYC and New Orleans about the lack of communications equipment and effective communications channels and so forth.

Boy, oh boy, does taking back the Senate matter.