Shifting post-COVID-19 residential settlement trend requires new direction on advanced telecom infrastructure

COVID19 has opened our eyes to a new possibility.  Give people a choice of where to live – one that does not depend on where they make their living – and they vote with their feet for lower density, more green space and, most of all, for affordable costs. It has become clear that the celebrated “magnet cities” are threatened by their own success.  They are dangerously overcrowded.  They are vastly over-priced for all but the most over-paid.  That’s why San Francisco and Manhattan have only half the number of children per household as the US metropolitan average, while suburbs and exurbs have over one-third more.  Without kids, a community stagnates, even if it you can’t see it now.

The Intelligent Community Forum has been predicting for some time that the future belongs to small-to-midsize places with the broadband assets to fully participate in the global economy.  The internet is a distributed platform that offers equal access to those who can afford it regardless of location – as long as your location has good broadband. The unexpected gift of COVID19 is to show that this future possibility is real.  It is not where you live that determines your economic destiny.  It is how well connected you are and whether you have the education and skills to make the most of it.  Those are the issues that deserve our full attention as we recover from the first global plague of the 21^st Century.

https://www.benton.org/blog/whatever-happened-magnet-cities

America's current reliance on large investor owned companies to build and operate advanced telecommunications infrastructure has led very uneven, highly granular deployment and affordable access. These companies prefer to build infrastructure to serve dense housing development because their investors require rapid returns on capital investment. A higher concentration of homes better assures those rapid returns investors demand. 

As this article notes, demand for advanced telecommunications is heading in the opposite direction, toward less dense development, a trend that preceeds the pandemic. That has enormous implications for U.S. telecom policy and suggests a new direction is necessary, shifting away from reliance on large investor owned providers and toward alternatives. These include companies backed with patient investment capital more aligned with the high costs and slow ROI of infrastructure, regionally owned and operated public sector owned infrastructure and consumer cooperatives.