Broadband policy for the future: Building upon conceptual framework

Paper in proceeding, 2010

Nowadays, broadband has been gained much attention from both national and international as an effective tool in driving society to a more advanced economy. Different policies and initiatives have been implemented in different countries while trying to reach the same goal which is to increase broadband growth in a country. Increasing broadband growth in a country results in the growing of opportunity for people to participate or enjoy benefits which has been brought by this network society. The European Union (EU), for example, has initiated several mechanisms or policies for more than ten years with an aim to ensure that the EU fully benefits for generations to come from the changes that the information society is bringing. At the about the same period of time, the development of broadband policy has also been initiated in Japan. Even though the development in these two jurisdictions results in the high broadband deployment these days, the difference can be seen in terms of perspective for the future development. The EU has achieved broadband growth which based on DSL technologies while Japan has achieved growth of fiber networks. It cannot be denied that applications development and more users in information society require more and more of high network capacity which can be pursued efficiently through fiber networks. In this sense, broadband policy which has been developed in both jurisdictions for more than ten years cannot only be taken as a tool to increase broadband deployment in a country, but it should also be taken as a strategy for future development of a country. From this perspective, the paper presents a conceptual framework of broadband policy where both theoretical concepts and case studies on the EU and Japan will be addressed in order to support the idea. The theoretical concepts mentioned in the paper will be focused more on the institutional environment, to explain the dynamic of social and economic development in a holistic fashion. Building upon theoretical concept and case studies, the paper presents broadband policy from two aspects, which are the sector agenda and the strategic agenda. The sector agenda consists of strategies or measures implemented by a country with the primary objective of increasing broadband growth in a country. Meanwhile, the strategic agenda comprises strategies of using broadband for some specific national agenda consisting of the global market, country competitiveness and sustainable development. Toward the end, the paper suggests that the integration of those two aspects into national policy for long-term development depends on many criteria, in particular the co-dependence of related actors. Therefore, broadband policy is no longer an issue set by a single government entity but requires integration between several ministries and agencies, a complex and multi-faceted integration which will be explored in this paper.