The United States has failed to bring the benefits of this telecommunications revolution to most of our population. While more households are adopting broadband, our relative position in the world is worsening. We have fallen to 16th among the major industrialized nations in terms of broadband adoption even though we were the home of the computer and the Internet. This is not surprising since we spend relatively less as a nation on telecommunications investment and we spend relatively more as consumers for slower speeds. For example, the Japanese can obtain broadband connections with 8.5 times the speed but at one-twelfth the cost. To make matters even worse, there is a substantial digital divide that separates access to high speed Internet based on income and geography