Homeowner's Blog

On February 29 Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said that bringing basic broadband Internet service to American households without access could cost as much as $20 billion This will be expensive, but the penalty paid by Americans who do not have broadband access grows every day. They don't have the growing number of educational, economic, healthcare, or many other options available to those who do, and they are destined to becoming even  more disadvantaged over time as the digital divide widens. Devising the most cost-effective way to bring broadband Internet service to the three million to six million American households without access is by far the most important priority for U.S telecom policy today.

The immediate challenge is spending the $7.4 billion in broadband economic stimulus funding efficiently, since that process is already underway. The goal here is universal broadband availability and there are several common sense conclusions:

• Spend all of the money on deploying broadband to areas that do not have it now, and are not in the path of private broadband build-out for the next few years.

• Rely on temporary subsidies to help those who have broadband services available to them but can't afford them. As competition evolves, available speeds and choices will increase, prices, will  drop and many subsidies can be cut back.  

• Tap the $7 billion federal fund that subsidizes phone services in rural areas and for low-income Americans. The use of land lines is declining as both broadband and cell phone use (and mobile computing) is increasing. There is no longer any point in subsidizing a rural telephone company's land line expenses where mobile voice/computing service is available, so subsidize the latter. Rural telephone companies have the choice between morphing into broadband solution providers or else becoming the 21st century's buggy whip manufacturers.

• It is worth investing reasonable amounts in efforts to try to improve adoption rates, but important to recognize that they will increase organically anyway as more technology oriented generations succeed their elders.

Agencies in charge of distributing the funds will have to make subjective decisions in many cases on whether to spend the same amount of  money on higher speed broadband to fewer unserved or slower speed broadband to more of the unserved. They will get criticized even when they make the right decisions. It is inevitable that in any major ramp-up of this magnitude that some bad choices will be made as well. The most that we can expect, but what we all have a right to expect, is that the FCC and other organizations involved in the path to universal broadband availability keep their eyes on the ball, be willing to admit mistakes, learn and improve as they go, and continue their role as universal broadband evangelists until broadband is available to every home in America. So long as they are doing a reasonable job of it, the rest of us also need to continue to stand up for the importance of achieving universal broadband availability, and support the FCC and other involved agencies in this critical mission.

The $7.4 billion in broadband economic stimulus funding alone is not going to achieve universal funding. The government can't afford to pay for all of the costs anyway. We also need to think about new economic incentives to encourage the private sector to increase its investment in broadband rollout and related areas.