As policymakers consider how to re-ignite the technology-led economic boom of the 1990s, it's clear there is at least one sizeable infrastructure project that could pay off massively: the rapid spread of broadband telecommunications, which could significantly boost productivity and bring a whole host of new products and services into the homes of American consumers. Today, around 10 percent of American households have broadband (either through cable, satellite or DSL), but the speeds offered are actually too low for many advanced applications like robust video-conferencing and full length, high quality video.

Government has a dual role in expediting the spread of faster broadband: eliminating regulatory barriers to the deployment of broadband infrastructure and the applications that rely on it, and providing positive incentives, especially in rural and other underserved parts of the country -- much as government facilitated rural electrification.

Yesterday TechNet, a prominent, bipartisan coalition of New Economy entrepreneurs, released a new report on what government should do to goose the broadband revolution. The report calls on the President and other policy makers to make broadband a national priority, and to set a goal of making an affordable 100-megabits per second broadband connection available to 100 million Americans by 2010. This is approximately 1,800 times faster than the typical dial-up modem most web users have at home now.

This is an ambitious goal, but the TechNet report is right to suggest that current broadband policy does not aim high enough.

Among TechNet's sensible proposals are the removal of regulatory roadblocks to new broadband applications, such as Internet telephony, and a call for industry-led standards for copyright protection technologies. TechNet endorses two initiatives long promoted by the Progressive Policy Institute: expanded government investments in e-government applications, including digital learning and telemedicine; and a sharp increase in federal funding for research and development. This should surely include more support for such critical research projects as the Clinton Administration's "I.T. Squared" initiative to increase information technology research and the advanced Internet 2.

At the state and local government levels, TechNet echoes the PPI's State and Metropolitan New Economy Indexes by urging governments to stop treating telecommunications providers as "cash cows," who can be milked for fees when obtaining access to public rights of way, and instead begin treating them as providers of critical infrastructure.

TechNet also rightly focuses on the shortage of wireless spectrum for new broadband wireless applications -- including satellite and fixed wireless broadband, technologies that will be critical in ensuring broadband access in rural areas.

Because creating a national broadband infrastructure will have system-wide benefits, of the kind obtained by wiring the nation for electricity or building the Interstate Highway System, there is clearly a role for positive economic incentives for deployment. But how those incentives should be structured, and to whom they should go are still open questions. (Businesses or consumers? Providers or customers? Disadvantage areas or all areas?)

The most controversial TechNet proposal is a request that the Federal Communications Commission "carefully consider whether the application of unbundling requirements to new last-mile investment will discourage such investments." That sentence gets into the tangled question of whether telephone companies that build broadband "pipes" into homes must make them accessible to competitors, and if so, under what conditions?

That's a topic for a different day, but it will never be resolved until the country makes national commitment to achieving a broadband infrastructure for the future. That's what TechNet calls for, and we are happy to share their commitment.