Moving National Broadband Plans to Implementation and Evaluation: Comparative Analysis of Progress in the USA and South Korea

At the most recent count, over 134 countries have adopted National Broadband Plans (NBPs) in recognition of the importance of broadband networks and services as enablers of an important emerging economic sector that establishes national competitiveness. The NBPs generally provide a roadmap for how the countries intend to increase broadband coverage, network speed, or application focus to improve economic output. These broadband roadmaps typically include their own vision and goals for utilizing broadband technologies, as well as specific implementation strategies to achieve them. Given this substantial attention and focus on a global scale, an interesting research question is how effective NBPs have been in executing and achieving their goals over time. A report by the ITU and Cisco recently found that countries adopting an NBP were associated with higher penetration rates of broadband service. While this report is a good start, NBPs typically address a much wider set of issues than just broadband penetration, so there is a need for further research on the efficacy of NBPs. And there is room for concern. The web view of the NBP “progress report” in the United States, for example, indicates its progress (or official monitoring of the progress of the NBP) has stalled out only one year after being published in 2010 with no progress updates since early 2011. While a comprehensive review of the efficacy of all 134 NBPs throughout the world is beyond the scope of this paper, we propose instead to look at the mechanisms, strategies, and processes that are proposed in NBPs in order to move from planning to implementation, and to evaluate those approaches that appear to have been the most effective given the achievements of NBPs. All the NBPs contain lofty and socially important goals for more effective utilization of broadband technology, but how effective are the plans at monitoring progress to achieve the goals? The paper will focus on how NBPs propose to track and monitor progress at the outset of the plans, including progress monitoring, rather than the specific aspirational objectives of NBP plans. We will focus on the NBPs of the United States and South Korea – two countries that have taken very different approaches with their NBPs – to compare and contrast the planning and monitoring strategies employed, and the plan efficacy that might be inferred from the different approaches. The outline of the paper will be as follows. First, we will examine in depth the implementation and monitoring strategies proposed and employed by the U.S. and South Korea, and include notable approaches from other countries throughout the world as well. Second, drawing upon this information and other basic approaches to strategic planning, we will construct a straightforward framework describing the key ingredients for an effective implementation and monitoring strategy. Third, we will apply our planning and monitoring framework to describe the success and failures identified in our review of the progress made in the U.S. and South Korean NBPs. Finally, we conclude with the implications of our analysis, including suggestions for improving the planning and monitoring mechanisms of future revisions of NBPs in the U.S., South Korea, and elsewhere. Going in, our hypothesis for this research is that the U.S. and South Korean NBPs adopted very different progress monitoring systems that were active and useful for varying durations of time, but a lack of systematic evaluation of longer-term progress has reduced NBP efficacy over time in achieving key NBP objectives. Thus, if NBPs are not to be a fad, these NBPs and presumably others would benefit from a more rigorous strategic planning process.