It really is, as those annoying Disney characters sing, a small world after all, so you have to believe that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is well aware of what his counterparts elsewhere in the world are up to when it comes to broadband. And this little bit of knowledge might be of concern to incumbent broadband providers in the U.S.
Genachowski used an awards ceremony to report that the National Broadband Plan has made "a lot of progress" but there is "a lot of work to do."
The United Kingdom's version of the FCC, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has skipped some of the steps that the FCC has been pursuing. Ofcom has required incumbent broadband provider BT (NYSE: BT) to give competitors fuller access to its fiber optic "duct and pole" infrastructure to help speed up the introduction of superfast broadband services.
BT, which publicly welcomed the decision (what else could it do?) has been building fiber-based networks throughout the U.K. and expects to reach two-thirds of the kingdom by 2015. Britain has been roiling over a disparity between urban broadband speeds that average about 5.8 Mbps compared to rural regions that get 2.7 Mbps on average.
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