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>> The way to overcome the impediments to broadband adoption is to mount programs that target the real problem and that's where the frustration has come in with the last decade of public policy related to the Internet and to broadband.
>> We've been so busy trying to somehow regulate the infrastructure; we've ignored the really necessary things to do.
>> The job is enormous ahead of us. When you stop to think that we're talking more than a third of the American public, we're talking over 100 million people that we need to get on broadband now, not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now, but today. That requires a lot of good thinking;
>> it requires a lot of careful planning. It requires the ability to motivate and to set policy at government that spurs this kind of broadband adoption and it also requires the kind of planning and marshalling of resources that private companies are very good at. So it takes both, it takes a partnership.
>> What broadband can do for people is not just bring them music videos. I know that music videos and social networking are very popular technologies right now, the ability to Twitter, the ability to SMS text, those are all things that are being massively used,
>> but if you're talking about the population of non-adopters or slow adopters, let's talk about the things that are really important. I'll go back to my little mountain valley, just to the west of D.C. It's an isolated area, a very senior rural population and the biggest need they have there is health care.
>> Diabetes is running rampant and heart attacks are very common. And yet, people largely do not have health insurance and the hospitals are a long way away. We literally have people die at home because they're not sure if they're sick enough to take the trip all the way over the mountain to get to a hospital that can help them.
>> And for many people, culturally, hospitals aren't a place you go to get healed; hospitals are a place you go to die. This mind set keeps them from getting good health care, but imagine if they had a broadband computer with the right technology that could read their blood sugar and transmit it to the doctor, or read their EKG and send it directly to the doctor.
>> And the doctor could then, at that point, decide whether they needed to come in, or whether an ambulance should be dispatched, or how to get immediate medical care to people who were critically sick: that's quality of life.
>> We were delighted to see much of the rest of industry coalescing behind this movement and forming a coalition called Broadband for America. We immediately joined Broadband for America, and I volunteer as a consultant for the Virginia Chapter.
>> It's a coalition that has the right idea they know where they're going, they know the job that needs to be done. Perhaps for the first time, we're starting to see a public private partnership where government begins to understand where the problem is, just as industry does.
>> And that gives us a powerful ability to use public and private funding, together, through nonprofit organizations, through corporations and through the government agencies, to solve the problem of broadband adoption.