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Dogs of all ages can learn new tricks. "We learn," Dr. Alan Egelman told me when I wondered why his recommendation for my blood pressure medicine reversed what he said two years before. New research had shown adding an ARB to an ACE inhibitor had additive effects. When I asked Columbia's Eli Noam why his research on media concentration seemed to contradict what he had said a few years before, he answered "I was wrong." I was wrong earlier this year when I looked at high speed wireless towers in mountainous Vermont would require fiber backhaul, I discovered when a similar hilly West Virginia ISP told me he nearly always could find a way to make wireless backhaul work and a Texas ISP said similar. Since then, I've discovered that Clearwire expects to build its nationwide WiMAX network almost exclusively using wireless backhaul and that AT&T out of territory will be primarily wireless as well.

D.C. is a city of magical thinking, with discussion often dominated by sandcastles created by interested parties. With hundreds of millions at their disposal, the 2+2=5 crowd of lobbyists can create what appears a consensus around ideas that don't stand up. If a slew of "experts" repeat something half true, it seems reasonable, and it's something people want to believe, people believe it even if a quick look at the facts reveal it to be nonsense. Here's a couple from the August FCC Broadband workshops that are not true:

There are are or will soon be significant congestion and bandwidth problems on large networks like FiOS and U-Verse.

Prima facie rebuttal: At the workshops, David Young of Verizon said that FiOS doesn't have any significant congestion problems. Senior VPs Tom Tauke of Verizon and Jim Cicconi of AT&T have been saying the same thing for three years - I have them on videotape - about their DSL networks. ("We do not degrade. If we receive at our edge a stream up to 3 megabits for a customer who has paid for 3 megabit service they will get that three megabits to their home." ) Comcast filings state the same on the downstream, and their improved upstream network has all but eliminated upstream problems as well.

Why this matters: All the talk about network management, pricing tiers, etc. is based on a need for the carriers to recover costs caused by congestion and bandwidth demand. If bandwidth is so cheap congestion is almost never an issue, then none of these are necessary. In fact, in the most competive markets (France, Japan) major networks give all customers maximum speed (up to 100 on cable and up to 24 on DSL, limited by line conditions) with no caps or very high ones (900 gigabits at NTT) and don't use traffic management. The most common arguments about net neutrality, two sided markets, etc. depend on this assumption and it is garbage. (Other arguments against NN, such as the side effects or regulation, are perfectly sensible.) There are very serious issues for many small carriers, some of whom in rural areas are paying 20 times as much as large ones for bandwidth, a problem that needs to be fixed. Wireless is a tougher question, because incremental bandwidth is more expensive. The best solution for wireless net neutrality is to rapidly increase effective bandwidth, as Washington intends.

Talking up broadband and a little training significantly increases demand.

Prima facie rebuttal: The most publicized claim of successful "demand stimulus" comes from Connect Kentucky. But when you look at their data, rather than their press release, you find that by their criteria the "demand stimulus" was worse than useless. The results were more than explained by the increase in availability in those two years in Kentucky. After five years of programs like this, I don't know a single solid example of anything other than price cuts significantly increasing broadband uptake among the remaining "unserved," overwhelmingly poor. old. or learning disabled. I'd guess that some initial training would make a difference, but I haven't seen that in the data. I wish I were wrong.

Why this matters: The U.S. intends to spend $hundreds of millions for organizations led by middle class people to tell poor people why they should give $300-400 per year to carriers. Some are well meaning idealists, some are patronage hacks, and some are poverty pimps like I haven't seen since the '60's. I'd love to believe it will work, as do the many honorable folks who have been taken in. It's a great way to avoid discussing the real problems of broadband, which begin with 30% price increases at the bells. The bells have literally spent $tens of millions promoting spending public money on Connected Nation and similar to take the heat off the real changes needed. (Incidentally, CN is vilified by public advocates for their ties to the bells etc. and some public policy stands. I've spent time with them, and believe they are honestly trying to get poor kids connected to the net and are fooling themselves about their effectiveness. I call them "benevolent believers in a flat earth."

Give a carrier some money and they will spend it on better networks rather than increased dividends and buybacks

Prima facie rebuttal: Nearly a decade of increased margins on broadband but reduced investment at most carriers. They also won major victories on regulation in the same period, which they promised would increase investment. AT&T cut capex in half around 2003, while Qwest and most of the regional telcos depreciation is 30-50% higher than their capex. Dividends and buybacks have gone up dramatically. Again, the conclusion that increased carrier revenue would mostly go to better service is not in the data.

Why this matters: Some folks who haven't looked deeply at the weak competition have argued that giving carriers more money - by letting them charge extra to video providers, for example - would result in increased investment. That's the two-sided market theory, some pretty equations that break when competition is less than perfect. It's another justification for letting the carriers limit the net so they can collect more money. This was brought home to me when an analyst asked Bill Smith of BellSouth "You just told us your DSL costs are coming down dramatically. How much do you think prices will drop?" Bill, one of the best in the business, replied "I think we're going to give it to our stockholders."

Public interest advocates always tell the truth because they don't have a corporate agenda

Prima facie rebuttal: Many of the mistakes even the best public interest advocates have made in the broadband debate.

Why this matters: We are all human and make mistakes. I've learned to be especially careful checking the facts when a group or policy person shares my values, because I'm less likely to catch falsehoods whether mistakes or deliberate. Most are honest mistakes, such as an analysis last year that underestimated the impact of DOCSIS 3.0. They got it right in later work. But sometimes "public interest" lobbyists take the same liberties with the truth as corporate lobbyists. This was brought home when I did a technical briefing to prepare an FCC presentation. "That point isn't right," I told the speaker, on a hot button issue of the day. "I have to include it," he told me a few days later. "We talked it over and my boss said that's an argument that the FCC will listen to and we need it." I still give (modest) contributions and help to the group when I can, but that's part of the D.C. lobbying culture far too often.