William Tauzin: “Today we held the second of a series of hearings on the issue of broadband deployment in the Subcommittee on…”

“Today we held the second of a series of hearings on the issue of broadband 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. It is a bill designed to ensure that all Americans have access to high-speed broadband 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 broadband services. Now, for those of you who use the Internet, what we call the narrow band Internet, broadband 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.”