FCC SAYS IT'S DEVELOPING MASSIVE FINANCIAL MODEL ON BROADBAND DEVELOPMENT

摘要

The financial model being developed for broadband deployment will be the FCC's largest since its benchmark cost proxy model, the broadband team's deployment director, Rob Curtis, said at an Arts & Labs forum at George Washington University. He said the broadband team is "building a massive data set from every piece of publicly available information on both availability -- who gets what speed and where are they -- by technology, and also by infrastructure." Once the model is completed, the broadband team will "run a bunch of different scenarios" at the census block level and come up with a "statistically valid way of saying who's got what, and have a pretty good point of view of what needs to go where and at what cost." nnCurtis said, "It's incumbent upon us to come up with the best cost estimate that we possibly can about how much different choices cost. Every possible step within the span of six months that can be taken to make it as accurate as possible ... will be taken." No decision has been made on whether to put the cost model out for comment before the broadband plan is released, he said. The FCC also hasn't decided how much of the model it will release when the plan comes out, he said. He predicted that the commission will provide "a very large appendix" and documentation for the model. "I think, but cannot commit, that you will be able to play with at the very least lots of the derivative data," but raw data "will need to be protected."