Broadband Stimulus Package Nears Finish Line
The House and Senate held a pre-Valentine’s Day love fest last night and produced a compromise stimulus package; the two houses must now approve the conference bill, after which it would be sent to the president. For details on the full $789 billion plan, you can check out the legislation. We’ve outlined what the $7.2 billion million devoted to broadband funding will buy (if you’re looking for the tax credits, they’re no longer there):
- The grants will be split among two agencies — something most broadband proponents were against. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will administer $4.7 billion, and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service will administer $2.5 billion, which may cause problems for the rural ISPs.
- There are no longer any speed requirements, which means the federal government, which currently defines broadband at 768 kbps, will determine appropriate speeds for the underserved areas getting grants. Hopefully they will think ahead, and opt to push fiber where it’s reasonable to do so, and fast wireless where it’s not.
- The grants must all be dispersed by Sept. 30, 2010, and those receiving them have two years to build out infrastructure. Additionally, the FCC has one year to come up with a comprehensive national broadband plan to provide universal coverage and encourage citizens to use the network.
- Grant recipients must adhere to “non-discrimination and network interconnection obligations.” At a minimum, this means the principles contained in the FCC’s broadband policy statement.
- The Commerce Committee must gather much-needed data on broadband penetration within the next two years and create a publicly, available searchable database on the NTIA web site. Maybe it will resemble this map of France. The bill allocates $350 million for the project.
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I’ve heard good and bad things about bringing broadband to rural america, let’s hope these red states know what to do with it and we don’t end up spending billions for a technology that might go 1) unused and 2) become outdated before it’s completed ie Wimax
$350 mm for a map of broadband penetration? I could get that done for $50 mm, as could any number of entrepreneurs.
More broadly, which would be a more productive use of $350 mm for our country — funding a map of broadband penetration or 7 fundings of $50 mm each for startup companies that you or I or any reasonable group of people choose?
That $350 mm is a colossal waste. Luckily the other $788.65 billion will be allocated productively.
wtf ? why even 50million for figuring out broadband penetration ? DSLAMs are all managed by EMS/NMS systems by all carriers big and small… running a list of all of them and correlating them w/ population/census/city-maps etc (or Google Maps for that matter) shouldnt take more than a few months a few 100s of K for all carriers especially when a very high % of connections are managed by the big carriers and cablecos ?
the 7.2 million number in main body is a typo (bbbbillions) – perhaps 350million is 3.5Million or 350K>… i wish.
I agree with Ted that the amount of money spent on that map is simply stunning. That’s the price of deploying fiber to 350 000 homes at 1000$ a shot (average market costs). I would also point out that the French map in Stacey’s article is produced for very precisely 0 EUR.
This is exactly the kind of projects that could and should be crowdsourced. I’m sure there’s more than enough enthusiastic people willing to document the lack of choice in broadband they get…
Well, the $50 million included my professional sports team — sorry, forgot to mention.
DSLAMs and BRAS i meant… even the dumb BRASes do billing, dont they? billing records + DSLAM maps + POTS stuff gives you everything and netflow + cisco/juniper tools will give you the rest of the network map… to get fancier logical maps, data mine on netflow stats a la Guavus networks.
How long is it taking?
It has been over an year since recession hit the US. What exactly the policy makers are thinking?
I doubt, the color is more political than economic now, yes even now!
Yup, $350 million is excessive, but since the ISPs won’t give up their “competitive information” on subscribers and networks, and no one in the government wanted to force this, we needed to figure out some elaborately expensive way to do it otherwise.
@Stacey
People probably think you are joking or being flip, but this is absolutely true. Every state and hundreds of counties and smaller municipailities have all tried to obtain this information from carriers with very little success. What happens is that the carriers provide route maps that aren’t labeled or geo-referenced. They also make no distinction on their maps about projected or actual coverage or how up-to-date anything is. What may surprise some people is that even working inside a carrier it is very hard to get a hold of such data!
I don’t know why people are crying, though. It is very human labor intensive to assemble all the data into a usable form, even if you overlook the challenge of getting it. This isn’t about just making a single map. It’s about building a database of Geo-referenced data like what is done with the US Census. This means lots of jobs for GIS people and various types of network engineers. Isn’t that the very definition of Stimulus? Saying we should force the carriers to do it for us is like saying government should just force companies to hire more people rather than have any spending provisions in the Stimulus Bill.
@ Jesse
You make some very valid points. The underlying problem, IMHO, is deregulation in telecommunications. I am all for self-regulation if it can be done well, but, as with banking, telecom has become a virtual wild west of late.
It’s absolutely ridiculous, in the first case, to call 768 Kbps broadband. This speed will have the same effect as broadband caps ultimately will in terms of stifling information distribution and consequently innovation.
In the second case, it’s not the consumers fault that all the big telecom companies can’t get along, why should the consumer have to suffer? We hardly told companies that it was ok to make their networks proprietary, but without regulation requiring them to have standardization we are left at the impasse we currently find ourselves in.
The solution is regulation but it has to be done in a way that is EXTREMELY forward looking. Broadband caps, as mentioned many times on this website, are ridiculous and should be abolished; but at the same time 768 Kbps is far too slow. In addition utilities are public servants and their business models have to reflect that.
In all the solution is to make fiber the standard and not the exception, and to caste broadband infrastructure in the same light and importance as transportation.
-Josh