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 will be to provide an overview of the international experience with broadband, highlighting select national broadband strategies, with a particular focus on the deployment of broadband infrastructure, increase in adoption, and successful regulatory approaches. The Commission seeks to identify global best practices for broadband strategies within other nations that may have particular relevance to expanding broadband deployment, adoption and usage the United States.

Speakers and other participants will focus on a number of subjects concerning the international experience including national broadband strategies, regulatory and policy approaches; data on international broadband usage, adoption, competition, and pricing from select countries; and approaches to benchmarking such data. The workshop will focus on countries (and areas within those countries) similar to the United States (and areas within the United States) in terms of population, income, education, urbanization, and other criteria.

The workshop will discuss whether and in which areas the United States is behind relative to other countries; and of these, which areas the United States is on a path to catch up as well as which areas the United States is likely to stay behind in the absence of a policy intervention. Participants will also discuss those metrics which should be a priority for study and how these could then form a baseline for policy discussions in the United States.