- It’s what’s needed to rapidly modernize the nation’s legacy metal cable built for the pre-digital era of telephone and cable TV service to provide the capacity to handle rapidly growing bandwidth demand;
- There isn’t and will likely never be a viable business case for private sector investment alone to achieve this in the foreseeable future due to the high labor costs of building utility infrastructure, and;
- There’s an inherent conflict of interest between private investment and public interests when it comes to modernizing the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. The public interest is clearly for modernizing to FTTP to enable economic activity, education, medical care and civic engagement. The private investor interest priority isn’t necessarily modernization of telecommunications infrastructure and its positive effects but instead to offer premium, higher margin service offerings based on throughput speed tiers. Warren’s proposal includes throughput speed (symmetric 100Mbs) but only as basic service quality standard.
The goal of universal FTTP as a public utility properly establishes
an infrastructure-based standard for the nation considering only a small
portion of the country has FTTP connections. That’s far behind where the United
States should be in 2019 given that it should have achieved near universal FTTP
at least a decade ago. It’s the right goal
for where the nation is now. Not a geographic or bandwidth-based goal of extending “rural
broadband” or “improving broadband maps.” Broadband and specifically the lack thereof isn't a solution but rather the primary symptom of the lack of FTTP infrastructure and the consequent weaknesses of existing metallic infrastructure. If it reached nearly every American doorstep, "broadband" speeds and maps wouldn't even be part of the lexicon.
No comments:
Post a Comment