Private sector more efficient than Feds? Guess not.

[General Zod]

Certainly doesn't look that way. Oops.

The FCC's long-awaited, Congressionally mandated, already-castigated, Big-Content-anticipated National Broadband Plan will arrive in all of its glory on March 16, missing the ill-omened Ides of March by a day. The FCC's release strategy for the report has borrowed heavily from Hollywood—create "previews" of your blockbuster and use them to both whet audience interest and to gauge audience reaction. The latest trailer for the Plan rolled today as FCC Chair Julius Genachowski previewed the bits of the plan focused on public safety (PDF), which is about to get as much money for broadband and wireless as Verizon spent on FiOS.

In the eight years since the World Trade Center was destroyed, talk about "interoperable public safety" systems has been cheap; implementation has been hard. The FCC's contribution to the issue was 20MHz of spectrum set aside in the massive 700MHz auction of a few years back, when the "D Block" of spectrum was auctioned to private firms who wanted to pay a bazillion dollars for the spectrum and then build a completely new national wireless network to support both the public and public safety users (and to high public safety specs).

Sound like a pipe dream? It was; despite huge amounts of work, the bids never materialized. The D Block still sits unused and unauctioned.

The National Broadband Plan will return to the D Block, but with a different plan. "The private sector is simply not going to build a nationwide, state-of-the-art, interoperable broadband network for public safety on its own dime," said Genachowski today. So where's the cash going to come from? The federal government—and the request is not a small one.

"The Plan will recommend that Congress consider significant public funding—$16 billion-18 billion over 10 years—for the creation of a federal grant program to help support network construction, operation and evolution of the pubic [sic] safety broadband network."

$18 billion is about what Verizon has spent rolling out its FiOS fiber-to-the-home network, which should give you some idea of the scale of the task being considered here. It's not fully clear where the money will go yet, but Genachowski said that another D Block auction will take place, so some form of public/private partnership still seems in view. The FCC will also launch its own Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC) to handle the technical details of coordinating public safety radios and networked systems.

Genachowski does have experience in this area. In college, he served as an Emergency Medical Technician. "In addition," he said, "when the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, I was not far away, and my wife was closer. My brother, who worked very near the World Trade Center, had traveled in the subway under the Towers shortly before they fell."

Though he recognizes the money represents a "significant funding commitment," Genachowski and his team simply believe that the earlier vision of a "free" public safety network, as good as it sounded, simply wasn't practical. "We have gone too long with little progress to show for it," he noted.

Update: The FCC lets us know that it has "updated and corrected" its cost figures for the project. $6 billion is set aside for grants to actually build the wireless network; another $6-$10 billion are set aside for grant to fund the ongoing operation of the network.

Basically, the Feds got sick of the private sector dragging their feet on public broadband and took over when it was clear that the current providers weren't going to do jack shit. How do Lolbertarians explain this, I wonder?

[KlavoHunter]

What exactly do they mean about a "Public safety network"?

[JointStrikeFighter]

Obviously the free market didn't need broadband

[General Zod]

What exactly do they mean about a "Public safety network"?

Reliable communications networks that are always on in the case of disasters like 9/11 and such, from what I can gather. PDF link. iirc communication traffic was jammed on 9/11 because of everybody trying to make calls all at once.

[KlavoHunter]

Ah, I understand now.

[Master of Ossus]

I suppose I could point out that this has absolutely nothing to do with the relative efficiency of the government and the private sector, but peoples' minds have already been made.

[Samuel]

wanted to pay a bazillion dollars for the spectrum and then build a completely new national wireless network to support both the public and public safety users

I'm going to agree with MoO- it sounds like a situation with high costs and uncertain payouts, the sort of thing the market is averse to. This has nothing to do with efficiency- you could get the market to work on this is you subsidize the project enough so that they would consider it a worthwhile investment.

[Anguirus]

What does that objection have to do with the basic point--that the market is not an ideal vector for providing every public service that humanity requires, as many individuals seriously claim--of the OP? Clearly, the private sector has no interest in developing this system, so the government must step in to solve the problem. This suggests that despite libertarian claims, the efficiency of the free market at addressing needed problems is often zero, due to its own inherent nature to go where the profit is.

[mr friendly guy]

I suppose if the markets aren't willing to do it, for all intents and purposes it has the same results as being unable to do it. I am pretty sure when you can't do it you lose the right to be called efficient (at that particular task).

[Patrick Degan]

I suppose I could point out that this has absolutely nothing to do with the relative efficiency of the government and the private sector, but peoples' minds have already been made.

Yes, they have. Through observation. It's called "empiricism".