R&D won't solve America's urgent telecom infrastructure deficiencies

That group “really push[es] a comprehensive narrative that the U.S. broadband -- private-sector broadband -- has failed the country, that we are falling behind other countries in our broadband performance,” said Doug Brake, telecom policy analyst at ITIF and coauthor of “How Broadband Populists Are Pushing for Government-Run Internet One Step at a Time,” released in January. The populists think “we have these rapacious broadband monopolists that are not upgrading and just harvesting rents from the entire population,” Brake said. “We see that narrative as being incorrect on almost all the points that it puts forward.” Broadband populists have a two-pronged approach and use small tactical debates to achieve their overall goal, Brake said. On one hand, they support the bottom-up solution of government-owned infrastructure with internet service providers delivering services on top of it -- even while acknowledging the limitations of that approach. “We think that that model does not fundamentally support long-term innovation,” Brake said. “That’s competition just based on price andcustomer service. It’s not competition based on the technology itself.” He said he’d rather see ISPs incentivized to pour money into research and development of the next generation of broadband, for instance.

The debate over muni broadband expansion -- GCN

Brake's position is utter nonsense. Fiber optic connections to customer premises could have been made to nearly every American home, school and business by 2010 had the nation put in place the right telecommunications policy and planning in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was becoming apparent that telecom would shift from analog to digital and be distributed via Internet protocol. Fiber optic infrastructure remains the state of the art telecommunications infrastructure technology, with plenty of capacity to carry burgeoning bandwidth demand well into the future. Performing R&D on a possible successor is fine. But it's not going to solve today's urgent telecommunications infrastructure needs that require rapid deployment of fiber connections.

As for Brake's characterization of incumbent legacy telephone and cable companies being "rapacious broadband monopolists that are not upgrading and just harvesting rents," they had better well be. Because it's exactly what their investors expect of them: minimal capital expenditures and maximizing revenues from a captive, natural monopoly market.