[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9289]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         BROAD BAND DEPLOYMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Tauzin) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, today we held the second of a series of 
hearings on the issue of broad band deployment in the Subcommittee on 
Telecommunications. And in completing that hearing today, we arrived at 
a point where over 200 Members of this House, I think 207 by today's 
count, have endorsed and cosponsored H.R. 2420, which is a bill 
designed to prevent from happening in this country what so many people 
are talking about, something called the digital divide.

                              {time}  1700

  It is a bill designed to ensure that all Americans have access to 
high-speed broad band Internet services that are being deployed in some 
parts of America. According to a study by Legg Mason, in the next 4 
years about half of this country will have access to several, not one, 
but several different providers of high-speed broad band services. Now, 
for those of you who use the Internet, what we call the narrow band 
Internet, broad band Internet will be absolutely like day and night. It 
will provide Americans with access to incredibly high-speed data 
including both audio and visual images, in other words, motion 
pictures, streamed over the Internet in full realtime.
  It will open the door in short to incredible new opportunities in 
entertainment, information, long distance learning, and telemedicine 
and all the things that Americans look forward to in terms of this 
telecommunications revolution. It will indeed open the door to new 
opportunities in electronic commerce for small businesses across 
America. But the ugly truth is that this high-speed, fast-speed train 
that is about to arrive and provide all these wonderful services for 
about half of America will not arrive at all for about a quarter of 
Americans and will arrive only with one provider for another quarter of 
our great country. That means as far out as we can see, 4 years from 
now, fully half of our country will have only one provider of these new 
services or no provider at all.
  Now, if you live in any part of America that is not connected to this 
wonderful high-speed broad band network, you are going to find out that 
not only are you missing great opportunities but you may have to move. 
If you are a small business not connected to some of these networks, 
and you cannot connect to the high-speed network in which your business 
should be connected because it is part of an integral e-commerce 
distribution system, you may find yourself having to leave a small town 
in rural America that you grew up in and relocate your business 
elsewhere, or you may find out you are losing an awful lot of business. 
The problem for Americans is that the quarter of Americans who will not 
have any services generally live in rural America or in urban center 
city portions of our country. So the urban poor and the rural poor of 
our country will be the last to receive the benefits from this high-
speed digital revolution.
  Now, something can happen to change that. Buried in the ground, 
connecting all the rural communities of America and much of the urban 
centers of our country are fiber optic cables that have been laid by 
the telephone companies, the Bell companies. But under Federal law, 
these cables, these fiber optics that could connect little towns across 
America to the high-speed trunk lines of this new broad band revolution 
cannot be used because the FCC literally will not allow the telephone 
companies to get into the broad band business across what is called 
LATA lines. They may be State boundaries or lines drawn on a map inside 
a State that currently separates local and long distance telephone 
calls.
  You should ask me what does local and long distance telephone calls 
have to do with the Internet and this broad band revolution. I should 
tell you it has very little to do with it. It only has to do with voice 
communication, telephone communications. But these old laws that 
restrict the local telephone company from crossing those lines and 
getting into long distance telephones also currently restrict the 
telephone companies from connecting all the small parts of America to 
the broad band Internet.
  It is time we lift those restrictions. In 1996, we tried to 
deregulate communications in America. We did a pretty good job, but we 
left the regulations in place on the local monopoly telephone companies 
until there was enough competition for telephone service in those local 
markets. We certainly did not intend to stop the telephone companies 
from being a full-fledged competitor to connect rural parts of America, 
small town America, urban center city America to the great advantages 
of this new age of communications, the broad band digital high-speed 
network. So House bill 2420 will do just that, will lift those 
restrictions, will create competition, offer connection, connectivity 
for everyone in this country. That means ending the digital divide.
  Mr. Speaker, House bill 2420 needs to be passed. We are rapidly 
approaching the point where over 218 Members of this House will have 
signed on urging its passage.

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