Blaine Harden’s article in today’s Washington Post extolling the virtues of Japan’s broadband deployment reads like a bad knockoff of the 90’s thriller “Rising Sun”? The facts are muddled together in a way that suggests we should drop what we are doing and follow the Japanese model. Of course, they also suggested this in “Rising Sun”? Too bad the Japanese economy collapsed leaving us solely with a so-so action picture starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes.

Muddling together a different regulatory framework with different geographic and technological realities paints a picture of despair that will no doubt be used by sound bite opportunists to take cheap shots at America’s broadband deployment. The piece suggests that compelling phone and cable companies to open up their wires to Internet providers would lead to an explosion in broadband. But we’ve already seen an explosion in broadband in the U.S. triggered by government policies based on market-based competition.

In March 2002, the FCC clarified that high-speed cable-modem service is an information service not subject to unbundling and other Title II regulations of the Communications Act. In August 2003, the FCC exempted wireline fiber facilities from the Commission’s unbundling requirements. In September 2005, the FCC clarified that wireline broadband Internet access service is also an information service not subject to unbundling and other Title II regulations of the Communications Act. These actions have accelerated broadband deployment in the United States from just over 4 million broadband lines in 2000 to just under 16 million broadband lines in 2002 to approximately 32 million lines in 2004 to almost 65 million lines in 2006.

This rapid growth shows a direct correlation between the FCC’s market-based policies and the explosion of broadband subscribers in the United States. The lack of regulation on wireless services also has permitted wireless broadband services to explode as well. In June 2005, there were almost 380,000 wireless broadband subscribers and just one year later, in June 2006, there were more than 11 million subscribers. The Commission’s recent video franchise order promises to further increase the demand for broadband service.

The article suggests that a large part of Japan’s success is based on geographic and historical factors noting the razing of Japan’s infrastructure in World War II and the fact the Japanese population is “relatively small, highly urbanized and densely populated.�? Since no one I know is interested moving the entire Midwest to either coast, I think we are going to have to take another path.

The story also discusses how the Japanese government gave NTT, the main service provider in Japan, tax breaks and grants to upgrade its networks to fiber. That might have been the right approach in Japan, but the U.S. Congress has yet to implement a similar plan here to give AT&T, Verizon & Comcast the same tax breaks and grants to deploy fiber across the country’s 3.6 million square miles.

American consumers have plenty of choices for Internet access from DSL, cable modem, wireless, satellite providers – and, increasingly, over power lines and municipal Wi-Fi systems. In fact, there are more than 1,270 broadband service providers in the U.S. today. With North American telecommunications companies projected to spend $70 billion on new infrastructure this year, it’s clear that market-based competition is working but unfortunately, the reporter didn’t talk to any American service providers to understand the full picture before drawing these misguided conclusions.

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