Stimulating broad-minded broadband build-outs.

By Carl Ford

When I presented to the staffers at the NARUC meeting last week, I suggested that given the rural initiatives, the states were the ones to know where the money was most needed. {Slides available upon request}

The stimulus bill was a boom for rural broadband, except the guidelines are subject to discussion. The National Telecommunication and Information Administration was given $4.7 billion to administer, and it's allowed to allocate a portion of it to the FCC. The Rural Utilities Service in the Department of the Agriculture is the second beneficiary of the stimulus, receiving $2.5 billion.  There is also a $200 million initiative in the stimulus that allows Fiber to the Library with a Wireless network available for the citizens. It's also possible that broadband strategies work their way into some of the shovel-ready strategy.  

All of this is good, and it's technology neutral, which lets networks be developed based on the local needs. This is not going to be an FCC tops-down approach in the end.  The administration has its hands full with the pressing problems in other places. I have nothing but respect for the people working with the administration that I know, and I believe we will see good policy decisions in the future.

But the opportunity right now is local.  And if all politics is local, so is access.

Mark Hewitt shared with me some slides his partners have been presenting on getting the bandwidth build-out through out all portions of each state. As someone who was around when the Internet first became commercial, I have been very aware of holes in the network. So I commend this initiative and hope that they find the appropriate people in each state to listen to their approach. 

If you are a user you will not sit there and say to yourself, "I know there is a hole in the Internet." With apologies to UPS, the Internet is designed to show you "what brown can do for you." As in brown outs. When Taiwan suffered a Digital Tsunami in 2007 with seven of the eight undersea cables cut, the Internet was still there, slow, but there.

That's the beauty of a best-effort network. It gave its best effort to find the way through. The fact that the cables were cut did not mean that bandwidth tools were put in place to block some traffic. Instead the Internet suffered the tragedy of the commons as it was designed to do.

Now the question gets reversed, when all this bandwidth gets put in place how can everyone benefit.  A build-out at the edge that comes back to a single backbone is not a strong or self-sustaining answer. The goal has to be to expand the core's ability to support the rural connectivity. My hope is the parochial build out will find balance in a cohesive national and international strategy.

So I vote for state rights to help form a more perfect union of access.