The Federal Communications Commission late last week adopted new rules meant to ramp up the advance of new technologies including those meant to bring hyperfast Internet connections over utilities' power lines.
This, according to analysts, could speed up moves to renovate electric power lines to bring video, telephony, and gigafast Web connections, with regulators hoping utilities eventually rival the big telephone and cable communications companies to drive down consumer prices.
Not that the phone companies didn't get a little relief in the doing. The FCC also agreed to a rule making it easier for them to replace copper wires with optical fiber, giving the Bells a better shot at surviving cable competition and even future power utilities, with FCC chair Michael Powell saying these rules would help to push forward the building of new high-speed networks.
"By crafting a minimal regulatory framework," Powell said, the FCC stands pro-competition making high-speed Net access real for just about every American Netizen.
The new regulations have already provoked one major company, SBC Communications, to speed up its own plan to get enough fiberoptic cable for 18 million homes. But they've also provoked one of the FCC's Democrats, Michael Copps, to suggest that failing to address what he called the "stickier" questions could in fact obstruct and not advance growth in power line technology. "If we want investment in broadband over power line, we need certainty and predictability," Copps said about the new regulations.
Copps is also said to have opposed a new rule exempting fiber loops – masses of wires extending from the nearest local telephone company central switching office to homes and businesses it serves – from a regulation that guarantees open access to competing Internet service providers, according to published reports.
That new exemption applies to high-speed Net through fiber connections to homes, but network operators must still let rivals use copper and fiber wires to sell regular telephony. But the FCC still required the local carriers to guarantee the fiber loops extend to within 500 feet of residences.
Copps isn't the only Democrat on the FCC who wasn't thrilled. Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein called it a setback to competition. And Consumers Union senior policy director Gene Kimmelman said the FCC changes took the U.S. "one giant step closer" to irrevocable two-company domination over the consumer Internet.
