Yes, we know—when the FCC puts out a press release (PDF) titled "Columbia Institute for Tele-Information to Conduct Independent Review of Telecom Capital Expenditures to Assist FCC," the eyeballs begin to glaze and the limbs feel suddenly heavy. But this one's worth rousing the brain for, because the FCC announcement means that the agency is taking a close look at just how much investment ISPs make in their broadband lines.

The FCC's National Broadband Plan is due to Congress next February, and the agency just launched the first of its 20 different staff-led workshops into all aspects of US broadband. The FCC is looking beyond its walls, too, already commissioning studies about worldwide broadband deployment and usage from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (of which Charles Nesson, the Harvard Law professor who recently represented file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum, was a cofounder).

Now, the FCC is asking Columbia's Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) to do an outside review of "projected deployment of new and upgraded networks to help inform the FCC's efforts in developing the National Broadband Plan."

This analysis won't be a mere economic examination of work that might be paid for by the government, either; CITI "will provide an analysis of the public statements of companies as to their future plans to deploy and upgrade broadband networks" but will also do a "historical evaluation of the relationship between previous such announcements and actual deployment."

Genachowski has promised an FCC decision-making process that is driven by data, and in commissioning the two studies, he appears interested in taking a hard look at two common complaints about US Internet service: 1) that some other countries are doing much better in terms of both speed and competition and 2) that, because of this perceived lack of meaningful competition, US ISPs have turned broadband into a cash cow without making enough investment in faster speeds or better technologies.

If today's press release sounds dry, it is—but ISPs have gotten the message and are already going public to defend their record of investment. Comcast points out that it previously pledged to upgrade 65 percent of its coverage area to 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 by the end of 2009; in an announcement today, the company raised that target to 80 percent (and it plans 100 percent coverage by the end of 2010). Translation: we're investing! (Which should be easy to do when you just announced a 4.5 percent increase in quarterly revenue, as the company did today.)

Most of the large cable companies are in a decent infrastructure position. Having already built out hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) systems a decade ago, there's plenty of bandwidth in the system, and relatively inexpensive DOCSIS upgrades at the headend can provide major speed boosts. That's one of the reasons that, for operators like Time Warner, broadband costs are going down even as revenue continues to rise. Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you try to claim that broadband costs are soaring and thus prices must be raised.

Coming in for more criticism are the telcos, except for Verizon, which is deploying fiber to the home across its service area. But none of the other major players are doing so, at most offering some fiber to the node schemes increase speeds marginally. Yet companies like AT&T are basically minting money; the company pulled in $12.9 billion in profit in 2009 alone, up from $4.8 billion in 2005. As an AT&T customer, numbers like this always make me wonder why I'm not surfing the Internet from a 100Mbps fiber-optic line—or at least something faster than 6Mbps DSL.

CITI's analysis dovetails nicely with the work that the Berkman Center is doing. Together, the two reports should give us a nice picture of just how the US stacks up to other countries, what the true costs of broadband deployment and upgrade are, and whether some companies have gone into "harvest mode" on their lines.