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.