Hope is not a strategy: America's aspirational and unrealistic advanced telecom infrastructure policy cannot attain universal access

It's been said that hope is not a strategy. The United States doesn't truly have a strategy to attain universal access to advanced telecommunications service for all Americans because its telecom policy of the past 25 years is largely aspirational. It's based on the hope that:

1. By having the telephone companies report annually on the broadband bandwidth they sell in a given census block, unspecified actions can be taken to increase competition notwithstanding that telecom infrastructure like other utilities is a natural monopoly.
2. Increased competition in turn will encourage investment in areas where the return on infrastructure is riskier, ensuring relative parity of access to advanced telecommunications among urban and less urbanized areas of the nation.
3. By creating "broadband maps" (based on #1) delineating levels of throughput offered by various wireless and landline technologies, the maps will guide early and efficient construction of advanced telecommunications infrastructure by showing where it’s needed in order to ensure universal access to advanced telecommunications.
4. The maps can be updated in 2022 to show where throughput is the lowest to guide federal grant subsidies to states to cover 75 percent of the cost of building advanced telecommunications distribution infrastructure at least comparable to that of existing cable TV providers.