The end of analog: Blair Levin on the National Broadband Plan

A Q&A with the Federal Communications Commission's Blair Levin -- Executive Director, Omnibus Broadband Initiative.

Asked what two things he hopes most that Congress takes on from the National Broadband Plan, he answered: 1) "Congress understands the importance of moving our country from essentially an analog platform to a digital one" and 2) Congress embraces the notion that, while broadband is not a solution to health care, improve education, improve energy savings, improve public safety, jobs training and job searching, improve government performance and civic engagement, it has to be part of the solution to all of these problems.

The plan, he said, will make recommendations, a significant number of recommendations to the Commission, Congress, the executive branch, and others. One of the things we learned from the international studies is that, for plans to succeed, you need a long term, sustained interest at the highest level of the governments in making the plan succeed. Hopefully, we have run a process that has created interest in it -- that people will feel that they have an obligation to keep going with it. If we do, the plan has a good chance of success. If we don't, if there isn't that sustained interested, then we won't. And that goes to the point that the plan is both a noun and a verb. Everyone will see the noun on March 16th. But the verb, the process moving forward -- if you look at other countries, you see that they had a plan and then they course corrected, when the markets changed, when certain assumptions weren't fulfilled.