Lacking goal of universal fiber, incrementalism dominates

Billions of dollars in recently announced federal grants have been called a once-in-a-generation opportunity for internet service in rural America. But the same prediction was made about other plans, and some of those fell far short of their goals.

Billions in rural internet grants could be a once-in-a generation opportunity

That’s because these are incremental and not wholistic ongoing initiatives to bring fiber to every doorstep that was connected to copper telephone lines in the previous century. They will inevitably come up short with limited timelines and budgets and “technical neutrality” favoring substandard stopgaps when this isn’t the clearly expressed goal.

Wisconsin has roughly 246,000 locations lacking access to even minimum broadband speeds of 25 megabit per second downloads and 3 Mbps uploads, and another 217,000 without access to 100 Mbps downloads and 20 Mbps uploads, adequate speeds for many households, according to the state Public Service Commission. The locations are spread across the entire state, said PSC Chairwoman Rebecca Cameron Valcq.

Once again, incrementalism is the reason. Investor-owned telephone and cable companies extend service to discrete, cherry picked neighborhoods where they expect a relatively rapid return on investment and that generate sufficient revenues to be profitable. The resulting infrastructure deficiencies cannot be neatly categorized into broad residential settlement patterns e.g., urban, suburban, exurban, rural. As Karl Bode described the issue, it’s infrastructure that is only half completed, leaving many addresses without fiber connections:

I’ve spent the better part of a life writing about how federal and state telecom regulators and politicians throw billions at companies for fiber networks that then somehow, repeatedly and quite mysteriously, never arrive. It happens over and over and over again, with only fleeting penalties for big ISPs that miss meaningful deployment goals.

Extending incrementalism of current U.S. telecom infrastructure modernization programs won't acheive ambitous Clinton campaign pledge of universal service by 2020

Hillary Clinton's Broadband-for-All Plan Faces Hurdles: In seeking universal, affordable broadband access, the Democratic candidate is aiming to “close the digital divide,” according to her campaign website. Clinton pledges to deliver on this goal with continued investments in the Connect America Fund, the Rural Utilities Service program and the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, and by directing federal agencies to consider the full range of technologies—including fiber, fixed wireless and satellite—as potential recipients.

These are existing programs that simply aren't big and bold enough to achieve Clinton's goal of universal advanced telecommunications service by 2020. They preserve the vertically integrated, investor-owned, closed access network and subscription-based business model that produces widespread market failure leaving too many American premises unable to obtain service. Two of these programs are aimed at rural areas and thus fail to address the fact that much of America's infrastructure gaps exist outside of rural areas as Clinton herself pointed out in an economic policy speech this week.

The programs cited by Clinton embody the incrementalist thinking that is part of the problem and not part of the solution that requires a radically new approach. Meeting her objective on telecom infrastructure will require a far more aggressive policy such as the National Telecommunications Infrastructure Initiative outlined in my 2015 eBook, Service Unavailable: America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis.

Alphabet's Eric Schmidt nails it: Incremental thinking holding back progress

Speaking at Bloomberg’s Breakaway conference Wednesday in New York, Schmidt also said Alphabet, the holding company that owns Google and other businesses including Nest and Fiber, will probably never break up and its job is to seek out transformative solutions. “There’s tremendous optimism around this next generation of scientists and thinkers,” Schmidt said. “There are problems that bedeviled us for centuries that can in fact be solved.” The government should play a role in accelerating these developments as they’ve done in the past, he said, pointing to initial public investment in Silicon Valley that allowed it to become the high-growth area it is today. Schmidt, who supports Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said the politicians and business leaders in the country have gotten used to accepting incremental solutions rather than taking bigger risks for the larger reward of innovative technologies and methods.“Government spends an enormous amount of money on the wrong things,” he said. “I would just like to have a little bit of it on these things which are moonshots, enormous-scale things that can benefit the country.”

Source: Google’s Schmidt Sees Genetics Advances, No Alphabet Breakup

When it comes to modernizing America's legacy metallic telecommunications infrastructure designed for a bygone time of voice telephone calls and cable television, Schmidt nails it when he points to incrementalism as a major impediment. 

As I wrote in my recent eBook, Service Unavailable: America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis, over the past two decades the nation has concentrated on achieving incremental increases in "broadband speeds" on legacy infrastructure rather than modernizing and replacing it with fiber optic connections for every home, business and institution capable of supporting the Internet-protocol based information, communications and services of today and tomorrow. In my eBook, I propose a crash federal initiative to build it given how far behind the nation has fallen. Google Fiber can't do it alone.

U.S. needs complete telecom infrastructure construction strategy, not minimalist incrementalism

The United States needs a comprehensive, holistic approach to ensure the construction of fiber optic infrastructure to provide robust Internet enabled telecommunications services in the 21^st century on a par with universal telephone service in the 20^th. The nation won’t achieve that standard in a timely manner by relying on incremental, one off builds.

While it’s laudable that some local governments have built or are planning fiber infrastructure in response to private sector market failure on the supply side (as spotlighted this week in Cedar Falls, Iowa by President Obama), these builds without significant and sustainable funding support cannot cumulatively provide the telecommunications infrastructure the nation needs and should have been planning at least two decades ago. As Steven S. Ross notes in his article in the November-December, 2014 issue of Broadband Communities, Bandwidth: Good for Rural Residents, Good for the Country, these localities that have or are putting in place modern telecommunications infrastructure participate in the same economy as do others lacking it.

New York State’s initiative announced this week it would dedicate $500 million of a $4.5 billion windfall arising from the settlement last year of prosecutions of alleged misconduct by banks and insurance companies to subsidize fiber construction. That’s one time, opportunistic funding that will help construct fiber in areas where it doesn’t exist. But it addresses only a small fraction of the state’s significant need as shown by the accompanying map. The money will quickly be exhausted with no plan fiber up the rest of the Empire State, reinforcing existing disparities. Similar underfunded initiatives exist in other states. Incrementalism allows policymakers to claim small, short term victories but leaves incomplete networks in its wake over the longer term.

Other examples of incrementalism are the continuing circa 2002 debate over “broadband speeds” -- which grows increasingly irrelevant in an age of fiber optic-based telecommunications technology -- and “net neutrality.” Net neutrality – the principle that all Internet traffic be given equal priority – is meaningless without robust network service in the first place. A more important principle than net neutrality is Metcalfe’s Law. It holds that the value of a communications network increases as the number of connections to the network grows. With so many Americans not offered fiber Internet service, the U.S. has a long way to go to recognize the full value of Metcalfe’s Law. It won’t get there with piecemeal incrementalism.