National Broadband Plan to Include Recommendations for Spurring Research

The FCC hopes to “articulate some directions and research recommendations” in its broadband plan, said Douglas Sicker, senior advisor on the plan. But the agency recognizes “that there are many other government agencies whose primary job is just this,” he said. “Our hope is rather to help them and augment a lot of the work they're doing in this report, rather than step on their toes.” The commission must not forget the research community, said Erik Garr, general manager of the FCC Omnibus Broadband Initiative. The FCC may need to be “more active and flexible, and saying that … for research interests we should be willing to be more flexible on rules and flexible on how we manage the spectrum.”

The FCC should try to change some researchers’ impression that it makes rules mainly to hold back innovation instead of promoting it, said Ty Znati, director of the National Science Foundation’s computer and network systems division. The commission may need to explain more how current rules provide a framework for research and innovation, agreed Rashmi Doshi, chief of the laboratory division at the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology. “I'm not sure if that kind of outreach has been done through the FCC.” Sicker agreed, saying he has met some researchers who didn’t know about experimental licenses available to them.

The FCC should require all federally funded broadband infrastructure to be “research enabled,” said Chip Elliot, project director for the NSF’s Global Environment for Network Innovations project. Networks built with government money should be opened to experiments by researchers running parallel to commercial offerings, he said. The rule should cover wireline and wireless, Elliot said. The government should encourage closer cooperation between academic and industry researchers, Znati said. The groups worked well together in the 1970s and ‘80s but have since fallen out, he said.

Many speakers urged longer-term investment by the U.S. in research and development. Research today “tends to be very short term,” said Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist. “I'm not seeing the kind of long-term willingness to put funding in for possibly years, even decades.” The funding profile for the ARPANET and the successor Internet program went on for nearly 20 years, he said. Without long-term funding, people aren’t pitching ideas that are as risky, “because it isn’t clear whether they'll have time to explore them successfully.” And venture capitalists may be more willing to finance a new company if there’s supporting research. More integration of R&D projects is needed, too, said Virginia Tech Professor Charles Bostian: “There are few research efforts looking at the complete picture.”

Broadband R&D is “absolutely critical to the nation’s future leadership in a globally competitive world based on knowledge and innovation,” said University of Michigan professor Dan Atkins. “Research on broadband networking must itself be broad, involving carefully selected large-scale pilot projects, well-instrumented and of decade-long duration,” he said. That’s tough to do under current National Science Foundation funding models, he said.

MIT Senior Research Scientist David Clark said a broad approach must be taken, involving discussion of not only the technology but of what he called the “cyber experience” as a whole. “If we care enough about broadband to make it a national priority, we should care about the range of innovations that make it valuable.” Funding levels have been inadequate, Clark said. In the U.S., many “bright students” receiving Ph.D.s avoid academia and research because the work doesn’t seem rewarding, he said. And some academics have gone overseas seeking a “more supportive and productive environment,” he said. Longer-term funding will allow researchers to focus on their inquiries rather than grant writing, he said.

“What are the canaries in the coal mine that [warn] that the oxygen level is down, things are starting to die,” asked Stagg Newman, the chief technologist to the National Broadband Task Force. “Cisco, for example, just awarded best inventions around the world in the Internet space and there were no Americans on that list.” Sickler noted: “I wonder if the canary in the coal mine is that the FCC is asking about research recommendations.”

“From an organization that gave you DSL, ISDN, quite a few things -- SONET, ATM, things along those lines -- I no longer see the kinds of investments that made those things possible,” said Adam Drobot, CTO and president of advanced technology solutions at Telcordia. “If I were to make a corporate case that 10 years from now we're going to have a gangbuster product and bring it to market, I just do not see the investment being possible.”

Drobot said other countries are making huge government investments in research as the U.S. falls behind. “What you're starting to see is that of the 5,000 Ph.D.s that we actually produce annually around 70 percent of those are not U.S. citizens,” he said. “They are now going back home and they can find better streams of funding on their home territories than they can in the United States.” Drobot said Telcordia has labs in Poland and in Taiwan “for exactly those reasons.” Drobot said that to experiment with 4G networks and advanced services, “you go to places where they're fully deployed.”

Marcus Weldon, Bell Labs’ corporate CTO, said some European carriers offer 100 Mbps service. “The U.S. is far behind that,” he said. “If the U.S. wants to lead, it has to set a bar of 100 Mbps to the population. That’s a very aggressive goal requiring many different technologies. To recover Bell Labs, we need to reinvest at the federal funding level, as well as to encourage grand challenge type projects.”

Weldon said some types of research aren’t being done in the U.S. “We can still do 10-year level research, but it really has to be probably tied to an existing technology or otherwise it falls into a big pit,” he said. It could take decades to see the effect of a slowdown of investment in U.S. technologies, he said. “It really is a long timeframe thing,” he said. “You're talking about 30 or 50 years before you know whether you've impacted your level of innovation.”

Victor Bahl, principal researcher in Microsoft’s Networking Research Group, said the U.S. has major challenges trying to stay a world leader. “The governments across the world are doing all the right things, putting all the right structures in place, the policies in place, to make sure that they come out ahead,” Bahl said. “If the U.S. sort of lags and doesn’t … internalize that at this point and doesn’t go back and reinvest in the research community which made them great, then there is a serious problem about 10 years from now, 15 years from now, that we will not be where we are today.”