Viva Las Vegas!

USTelecom CEO Walter McCormick was in Las Vegas earlier this week, talking about the state of broadband and the potential it holds for consumers and economic growth.  Walter was keynoting Telecom2008, a conference at the NAB Show, and took the opportunity to highlight the tremendous communications infrastructure investment underway by comparing it to past national infrastructure investments.  For instance, in today's dollars, the cost of the interstate highway system would be about $20 billion annually over 25 years; and the six Apollo missions would cost about $10 billion annually. By comparison, last year alone, nearly 14,000 broadband service providers - private companies - invested more than $70 billion in North American communications infrastructure.

Then USTelecom EVP Regina Hopper moderated a discussion with leading telecom executives from AT&T and Verizon --  Dan York, Executive Vice President, Programming for AT&T, and Terry Denson, Vice President-Content Strategy and Acquisition for Verizon -- to explore how the companies are bringing the broadband revolution to television, news and entertainment. AT&T and Verizon are investing billions of dollars to build advanced communications infrastructure across the country and to deliver new broadband-based television services to millions of Americans.

Finally, Tuesday featured a panel brought together by NextGenWeb.Org featuring key leaders in the public safety and education community.  Tom McDonald, CEO of BeSafe, a company using broadband to deliver on-the-scene data to first responders [NGW video interview], and Dan Fellini, executive producer of the soon-to-be-released One Economy Public Internet Channel, talked about how they are helping to improve their communities using broadband technologies.

The USTelecom and NextGenWeb panels showed clearly how high-speed Internet access helps deliver a stronger economy, critical public safety information, better education, advanced health care and a cleaner environment to communities throughout the United States.