We’re Not Luxembourg: Rural America Loses When We Put Too Much Stock in Flawed Global Rankings February 5th, 2009
Tom Amontree

CongressDaily featured a piece yesterday (“Tired of Waiting” subscription required) that focused on the important issue of extending broadband’s reach into remote pockets of our country.  It’s an important issue and a complex debate.  Since the publication has no response mechanism, I thought I’d post a few thoughts here.

The broadband industry has invested about $120 billion over the past two years to extend the reach and capacity of the nation’s high-speed Internet infrastructure.  This rivals what the federal government spent on all U.S. transportation networks during this same period.  Of course, the unique challenge facing unserved rural areas is that sparse populations do not attract the substantial capital investment that broadband deployment requires.

Fortunately for rural America, this reality is well understood by President Obama, his team and many leaders in Congress.  Enter the current round of proposals for innovative public-private partnerships to overcome this hurdle, kick-start our economy and help fulfill President Obama’s pledge to connect the country.

The article notes that two years ago USTelecom was critical of an oft-quoted study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that places the U.S. “behind” countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark.  We remain critical of this study today—out of concern for the very issues raised in this piece.  We share the President’s goal of striving toward universal broadband.  But to achieve that sweeping objective in this country requires innovative approaches that face the unique and substantial challenge presented by our nation’s vast geography.  In short, Luxembourg we are not.

The good news?  According to the World Economic Forum, our nation has among the most competitive broadband infrastructure in the world and its continually improving.  No other country can rival the breadth, scale and redundancy of U.S. high-speed Internet infrastructure. Even among rural Americans, less than 1 in 5 without broadband cite “lack of availability” as the reason (most say they simply don’t need the service).

Can we do better?  Always.  But faster speeds, more consumer choices, greater capacity and a connection to every consumer, all hinge on the same thing: constructive policies that encourage robust investment and, yes, that fill in the gaps in the remote 10% of the country that private capital cannot reach.

That’s the focus of the current debate on Capitol Hill.  Effective solutions will require a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges we face in achieving universal broadband and constructive collaboration from the public and private sectors to achieve this important national goal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Benefits of Broadband, Reports and Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.