Okay, you know the President’s got some serious chops when you’re out at Fry’s on a Tuesday night, frantically searching for a mini-plug to RCA adapter cable, and everyone – customers and staff, seems to be crowded around the big screen TVs watching a Presidential address. Love or hate his policies, the guy can draw an audience.
We’re trying not to step on anyone’s toes here and take political positions that could needlessly alienate anyone in the audience that holds strong opinions. (I, for example, remain a staunch supporter of the McGillicuddy Serious Party, despite the fact that has been completely disbanded.) But this blog is all about network performance, and we’ve talked repeatedly (here, here, here, here, and especially here), about improving U.S. broadband performance and availability. If a politician comes out and says: “Hey, we need to improve the performance of the Internet,” there shouldn’t be anything wrong with giving them their due.
Now, is the President’s way of improving broadband the best way to improve broadband? Hell if I know.
What I do know is that $7.2 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill has been allocated for broadband expansion.
Popular Mechanics has an in-depth article on the broadband improving funds – with some interesting conclusions. For example, the Pew Research Center found that broadband adoption is around 55 percent, yet the cable industry claims that 92 percent of homes have access to its high-speed internet service.
Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics concludes, therefore, that “broadband stimulus in America has less to do with pushing cables out to rural areas than it does with finding a way to make broadband more affordable.”
“The biggest problem with broadband service in America is not a lack of availability, it’s a lack of competition. Most users have only one or two options for service, and while prices have come down slightly, they are still relatively high for Americans who feel increasingly pinched. Pew’s study found an average monthly broadband bill of $34.50, down 4 percent from the previous year, but it also showed a gradual migration away from cable service, which tends to be faster and more expensive, to cheaper and slower DSL service. So the broad language could end up defining an “underserved” area as simply an area without enough competition to make service affordable”
PM also points out that broadband is important for consumer devices, personal cloud computing (think Google Docs, Mapquest and the like), the filing of governmental forms online (cheaper for the taxpayer than paper forms) the dissemination of news via YouTube and blogs, the access of electronic medical records, the tracking of energy usage, etc. Ultimately, anyone unable or unwilling to use these services essentially lose out on a first-world lifestyle – and ultimately, as PM puts it…
“…Americans who either cannot afford or are not capable of using reliable, robust Internet connections are at risk of becoming increasingly marginalized as citizens.”
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