Networking Pipeline: The last time we talked, a few years ago, you were talking about the prospects of bringing fiber to the home. Are you surprised at the rapid acceptance of broadband services?
Hundt: What's extremely interesting is the long-desired convergence of data and voice, which has naturally been given an acronym that would be meaningless to the user, VoIP. The way I like to think of it is as "broadband voice." I think it's better to talk about it as broadband voice, because what it means is you have broadband, and you get voice along with. That's what it is.
[And] Government should no more think about regulating the bits that are voice than they think about regulating the bits that are music or the bits that are a web page, or software that is downloaded from a server.
Of course, this is a sea change to say to this huge apparatus of regulation designed for the very lawful and legitimate purpose of building a web of communication that creates a common culture -- to say to this apparatus at the state and federal level that "we don't need you anymore," because bits are bits are bits and all we need is broadband -- their appropriate response is, well, not everybody has broadband.
But if you do the math, very simply, on the back of an envelope -- if I'm paying 40 bucks a month for two phone lines and willing to pay 20 bucks a month for broadband access, that's $60. Would $60 a month, per household, be enough money to float real broadband, "big broadband," as I call it? At speeds of 10 to 100 Mbps? Sure it would. For 60 bucks a month, times 100 million households... that's $6 billion a month, $72 billion a year. What we need is to have the business models converge to fit this opportunity.
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