The Federal Reserve isn’t the only agency that gets hamstrung by a dual mandate.

In its effort to provide wireless carriers with greater access to spectrum, the Obama Administration and the FCC fell prisoner to a “dual mandate.” First, there is the duty to get a national resource into the hands of those placing highest value on it. Second, there is the desire to fill federal coffers.

The second mandate has squelched the first. Signaling that there would be so many restrictions on carriers getting spectrum kept dampened efficient transfer of this resource to wireless carriers.

Allowing spectrum to go to the highest bidders while taking the handcuffs off of mergers is the Administration and FCC’s best bet.

A number of electric utility companies are expected to file initial briefs in their challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s national broadband plan. Specifically, the companies are challenging pole attachment rules adopted in the Implementation of Section 224 of the Act.

Initial briefs are due 17 February 2012.

The case is American Electric Power Service Corp., et al v. FCC; Case No. 11-1146 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

The Federal Communications Commission is fond of touting the goings on in the Old World when it comes to broadband adoption. We have been inundated by FCC-provided statistics on how the Europeans are eating our lunch when it comes to deploying broadband; that they are getting more of the product into the hands of every European. We should be more like Europe is the battle cry.

I for one have no shame in being Yankee-centric. I abhor the comparisons, especially given the differences in culture, demographics, geography, and terrain between the European Union and the United States. I especially hate the one-sided bias the FCC apparently has in playing up Europe and to a lesser extent Asia.

Well, The New York Times has an interesting article on how well the freeing up of television broadcast spectrum is going in Europe. Like the U.S., the European Union wants to free up spectrum for use by broadband providers for the social policy purpose of getting high-speed broadband services into the hands of all Europeans. This is a similar policy position to the one promoted by the FCC in its national broadband plan.

The problem is that the Europeans are not seeing the competition in broadband access promised by proponents of freeing up spectrum once held by television broadcasters. Access providers who may already be dominant in the market are also dominating the spectrum auction process.

Will the FCC be able to avoid creating a bottleneck in access to spectrum so that end user rates for wireless access services are not so exorbitantly high?

An interesting article in PC World, where John Holdren, President Obama’s chief technology officer, is cited as saying that pursuing a national broadband system should not have to involve a whole lot of government spending.

Would anyone be surprised if I said I couldn’t agree more?

The main determinants for purchasing broadband or any service for that matter are income and price. Comcast’s quarterly earnings report for the third quarter of this year gave us some insight into what drives demand for broadband. Comcast has found that it is consumers in the lower income strata that are having the hardest time keeping basic service.

Consumers are dropping wire line telephone service and going to mobile. Consumers are also ditching video services and keeping that high-speed pipe, at least according to Comcast. I suspect other cable companies are seeing consumers using over the top service all in an effort to maximize choice over programming while saving a few dollars.

With our national output at least a trillion dollars off of historical growth and unemployment expected to hover around ten percent well into 2011, the last thing the federal government needs to do is dump billions of dollars into a national broadband plan to incentivize consumers who are having a hard time affording service.

Instead, the federal government should put its focus on managing our resources so that we get national output and employment up. Let the private sector tailor the pricing plans necessary for getting as many customers on to the network as possible with the realization that not everyone will get on the ark.

I noticed during President Obama’s press statement yesterday about infrastructure investment that he did not include broadband deployment. The president asked Congress to support a six-year plan to invest in the nation’s transportation system. The investment would result in building 150,000 miles of highway, 4,000 miles of railway, and 150 miles of airport runway.

Wouldn’t this have been a good time to push the national broadband plan as well? Al Gore’s super information highway has long been touted as an economic growth engine. The FCC, however, has not been able to sell Congress on approval of the plan. With the potential loss of the U.S. House of Representatives to the Republican Party in less than four weeks, the likelihood of a Genachowski-led FCC broadband plan getting Congressional approval grows smaller each passing day.

Maybe the president realizes that the market is doing just fine delivering broadband to consumers. Consumers are exercising market choice by accessing the Internet via traditional digital subscriber line and cable modem services as well as by wireless services.

The message: maybe the super information highway does not need any additional paving