high-speed Internet access

The race to provide ultrafast broadband is on.

Roughly 40 percent of Americans do not have high-speed Internet access at home, according to new Commerce Department figures that underscore the challenges facing policymakers who are trying to bring affordable broadband connections to all Americans.

The Obama administration and Congress have identified universal broadband as a key to driving economic development, producing jobs and bringing educational opportunities and cutting-edge medicine to all corners of the country.

The Obama administration is calling on federal regulators to make more radio spectrum available for wireless Internet services so they can compete with broadband plans provided by the major phone and cable companies.

Lawrence Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on Monday that wireless connections offer the best hope for injecting new competition into the duopoly market for broadband services in the United States.

Making broadband Internet access universally available is this century's version of building highways or extending railroads coast-to-coast, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday.

After moving to a new building on the corner of 11th Street and New York Avenue, Google's Washington office got a face lift that made it as hip and colorful as the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. But Google's top Washington lobbyist, Richard Whitt, won't be spending much time amid the bouncy balls, LEGO bricks, and foosball tables this autumn. Come October, Whitt expects three times the usual number of meetings with members of Congress and Obama Administration officials. "Google and the others on our side will step up our advocacy," he says.

The national stimulus package passed by Congress in February may have been too enthusiastic about spending money on one particular project: figuring out where broadband Internet access is available and how fast it is.

Nokia is getting into the netbook game. The mobile-phone maker announced Monday the Nokia Booklet 3G, a Windows-based netbook with an Intel Atom processor that is set to compete in a crowded, but growing, market.

As Nokia sees it, more people want the computing power of a PC with the full benefits of mobility. Kai Oistamo, Nokia's executive vice president for devices, said the Booklet 3G is a natural evolution for a company in the business of connecting people.

Reaching the most remote rural customers with high-speed Internet access can be prohibitively expensive. Consider the case of Hill Country Telephone Cooperative in Ingram, Tex. The small provider is undertaking a $57 million effort to install fiber and bring broadband service to a substantial part of its market, which covers 2,900 square miles, roughly twice the size of Rhode Island. Yet even with this effort, the provider will not be able to serve 543 remote households, about 5 percent of its market area, because it's simply too expensive.

Britain's government pledged Tuesday to provide universal access to broadband Internet connections as part of a plan to spur the country's technology sector and boost the economy.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday that high-speed Internet access has become as "indispensable as electricity, gas and water" for most of the public.

On the campaign trail and in the White House, President Barack Obama has embraced the idea of providing high-speed Internet access to every community in America. But the plans for universal broadband have gotten off to a rocky start. Some technology executives complain that the $7.2 billion allocated in the federal stimulus plan isn't half the amount needed to do the job.