The goal of the workshops will be to promote an open dialogue between the FCC and key constituents on matters important to the National Broadband Plan. Key constituents will include service providers, equipment providers, applications providers, community groups, and other groups that have a stake in the future of broadband. Workshops will consist of meetings held at the FCC. The public will have the opportunity to suggest meeting topics and questions for the workshops. All meetings will be broadcast over the Internet when possible, and archived for viewing at a later time to ensure that everyone has access to the content.

The goal of this workshop is to explore what it means to be unserved or underserved with respect to broadband access, why such areas or groups are unserved and underserved, and what actions the United States should take to help stimulate broadband deployment in these areas. Specifically, this workshop will discuss how to define and identify unserved and underserved areas or populations. For instance, how should we consider the types of services available, the quality and price of services, limited availability of services, and competition? Further, this workshop will analyze what barriers exist to market entry or additional deployment that reduce or preclude broadband deployment in certain quarters of our nation and what data are available or would be useful to accurately identify these areas and understand the barriers to deployment. In this vein, the workshop will seek to understand the costs, revenues, regulatory barriers, market structure and other obstacles that currently inhibit additional and improved broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas. The workshop will also explore what actions the Commission can and should take to reduce such barriers to entry in these areas. Finally, this workshop will examine the expectations of consumers, providers, and governments for broadband access in unserved and underserved areas.