Obama stated his intention to invest in these areas during the presidential debates in September and came back to the issue in a December address that he issued as president-elect, but over the weekend he added concrete goals to the plan.

But on one aspect of the recovery plan — expanding broadband access — he offered no concrete goals and a supporting document issued by the White House doesn’t mention the word “broadband” once..

The broadband expansion is part of the infrastructure portion of the plan that will also invest in the road network, mass transit, ports and emergency communications system for law enforcement.

“It means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located,” he said without offering any goals.

Read the full story in PC World here.

The U.S. has gone from “leader to laggard” in broadband rollout and adoption during the past eight years under Republican President George Bush, said Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, speaking Tuesday at a forum hosted by Silicon Flatirons, a tech law center at the University of Colorado, held in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

In early 2004, Bush called for broadband to be universally available across the U.S. by 2007, but that hasn’t happened, Rockefeller said at the technology forum, which was webcast. “Despite all the rhetoric about improving Americans’ access to broadband, the Bush administration never made achieving their goal a serious matter,” he added. “Why? For starters, deploying broadband is really hard work.”

While several other speakers at the forum joined Rockefeller in calling for a more aggressive broadband rollout policy, others at the event questioned if the U.S. was as behind other nations in broadband adoption as some studies have suggested. Commonly quoted statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which rank the U.S. 15th among its 30 member nations in broadband adoption per capita, ignore several factors, said Michael Katz, an economics and business professor at New York University and former chief economist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Read the full story in the PC World here.