FCC Details Broadband Plans After Legal Setback

After a federal court struck down the FCC’s order against Comcast in the BitTorrent network management case, some pundits began to question the commission’s authority on a host of other issues in its national broadband plan.

The chairman of the FCC sees it a little differently. Just days after the court handed down its ruling, the commission announced its broadband agenda for the remainder of the year, promising to dig in on such controversial issues as spectrum reform and overhauling the Universal Service Fund.

Enterprise Networking Planet takes a look at the FCC’s next steps after the Comcast setback.

Just days after a federal court dealt the Federal Communications Commission a major blow to its legal authority to set rules for how ISPs manage their networks, the FCC is pressing ahead with its plan on national broadband — a plan some worry might suffer in the fallout of the court decision.

In its 2010 agenda for implementing the recommendations of the national broadband plan that it delivered to Congress last month, the FCC said that it expects to tackle issues like spectrum reform, a federal subsidy for broadband service and competition policy in short order.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also downplayed the impact on the broadband plan of the court’s ruling — which voided the FCC’s 2008 order censuring cable giant Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

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FCC Outlines Broadband Agenda Following Network Management Setback