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" There was plenty of fussing, fighting and political grandstanding, but in the end, the $787 billion stimulus bill passed. One sliver of the pie\u2014$7.2 billion to be exact\u2014has been allocated for broadband expansion to and improvement in &amp;quot;underserved areas.&amp;quot; That money is further split between two government departments: $4.7 billion goes to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is run by the Commerce Department; and another $2.5 billion goes to the Rural Development division of the Department of Agriculture. Calls last week to the two departments revealed little about how they would use and distribute the money. Representatives from both offices said they had yet to get all the details from the White House, and the bill itself is somewhat vague in defining important variables such as &amp;quot;what qualifies as broadband?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;what qualifies as an undeserved area?&amp;quot;  Believe it or not, the Department of Agriculture (DOA) has the greater experience here, having pushed out electric power to rural areas through the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. More recently, starting in 2000 the DOA began providing loans for the development of rural broadband Internet service\u2014but reports on the program&amp;#039;s success have been mixed. Over at the Commerce Department, the NTIA&amp;#039;s most recent experiment with large-scale telecommunications rollout is the digital television transition, which is widely regarded as a disaster of cost overruns and embarrassing last-minute delays.  Much of the impetus behind broadband expansion has come from alarming reports that the U.S. is &amp;quot;falling behind&amp;quot; other industrialized nations in broadband adoption\u2014a report last December by Free Press Action Fund called Down Payment on Our Digital Future (.pdf) claimed that we were in 15th place among developed nations. It&amp;#039;s worth noting, however, that, statistically speaking, most U.S. homes do seem to have access to broadband. The numbers surrounding total broadband availability in the U.S. are a bit hard to unpack, but the cable industry claims that 92 percent of homes have access to its high-speed Internet service. Yet another study from 2008 by the Pew Research Center found that broadband adoption is 55 percent, and that growth seems to be flattening out (the previous year&amp;#039;s figure was 54 percent).  So what&amp;#039;s going on here? Do we need more broadband or don&amp;#039;t we? Twenty-seven percent of the Pew report survey respondents weren&amp;#039;t Internet users at all, and they tended to be older (median age 61) and have lower incomes than those who do go online regularly. So it may be that broadband stimulus in America has less to do with pushing cables out to rural areas than it does with finding a way to make broadband more affordable. Here&amp;#039;s where the bill&amp;#039;s vague language can come in handy. The biggest problem with broadband service in America is not a lack of availability, it&amp;#039;s a lack of competition. Most users have only one or two options for service, and while prices have come down slightly, they are still relatively high for Americans who feel increasingly pinched. Pew&amp;#039;s study found an average monthly broadband bill of $34.50, down 4 percent from the previous year, but it also showed a gradual migration away from cable service, which tends to be faster and more expensive, to cheaper and slower DSL service. So the broad language could end up defining an &amp;quot;underserved&amp;quot; area as simply an area without enough competition to make service affordable.  Granted, there&amp;#039;s plenty of room for skepticism here. With ambiguously written legislation cramming billions of public dollars down the throats of multiple government agencies with a mandate to spend the money quickly, the potential for confusion, waste and abuse is high. Nevertheless I&amp;#039;m still cautiously optimistic, since the need for universal broadband adoption is actually far more pressing than even most public policy wonks understand. To understand why universal broadband adoption is so pressing, consider the experience of a customer who buys a new Windows Vista\u00C2\u00ADequipped computer. That computer was likely made in a factory a month or two previous to its purchase. By the time it is opened by its user, the computer&amp;#039;s operating system could have missed several operating system updates\u2014Microsoft releases software patches almost every day, and most computers are set to update cumulatively once a week. The typical update is between 500 kilobytes and 30 megabytes, which will take anywhere from 1 minute to an hour to download over a 56 kbps dial-up account (assuming our hypothetical new computer even has an integrated dial-up modem\u2014many don&amp;#039;t). If our new user had purchased a computer during Microsoft&amp;#039;s transition to Vista&amp;#039;s Service Pack 1, the computer would prompt its user to download an update of 435 MB, keeping his dial-up connection busy pecking for bits for more than 17 hours. (Mac users, don&amp;#039;t start snickering yet, the latest security updates to OS X Leopard and Tiger were 43 MB and 164 MB, respectively.)  The automatic updating of operating systems is only a minor example of a larger technological trend\u2014each new generation of technology evolves to take advantage of the fastest networking connections available at the time. Consequently, any new devices and services depend upon broadband connectivity to work properly. That makes many new consumer electronic devices, such as Blu-ray players, gaming systems and movie download boxes such as Roku and Apple TV, unappealing if not useless to users who don&amp;#039;t have high-speed Internet connections.  These are discretionary purchases at best, but what is far more important is the slow migration of basic services to Web-dependant formats. In the commercial space, that includes &amp;quot;cloud computing&amp;quot; applications such as Google Apps document-creation software, Facebook, Apple&amp;#039;s MobileMe and Microsoft&amp;#039;s Windows Live services. But the government is also increasingly reliant upon Internet connectivity for its services. Last year more than 60 percent of tax returns were filed electronically. The IRS has a stated goal of getting that number to 80 percent, and with good reason\u2014it costs 35 cents to process an e-filed return compared to $2.87 to process each paper return. What&amp;#039;s more, the Internet is increasingly becoming the public information dissemination tool of choice for the government: President Obama releases a weekly video address on YouTube, almost all government documents are posted as PDFs, and updates on the progress of the stimulus package are released on recovery.gov. Americans who either cannot afford or are not capable of using reliable, robust Internet connections are at risk of becoming increasingly marginalized as citizens.  Many in the business community refer to the concept of &amp;quot;network effects&amp;quot; to explain the collective value of technologies such as the phone system. As the logic goes, the more people there are who have and use these technologies, the more valuable they are to each user. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. When a technology reaches enough critical mass to become a societal benefit, every citizen who is not a user drags down the utility of the system for everyone else and hinders its overall development. For example, if I can rely upon the assumption that everyone has a touch-tone telephone, then I can roll out a service that allows people to dial in for information from an automated help line. If not everybody has a touch-tone phone, then I have to hire operators to field a certain percentage of calls; the more people there are who don&amp;#039;t have the more advanced touch-tone technology, the more operators I must hire, and at a certain point, the cost becomes prohibitive, so I don&amp;#039;t roll out the service at all.  Without widespread broadband adoption, many other federal technology projects cannot move forward efficiently. The stimulus bill includes funding for a rollout of electronic medical records. The Department of Health &amp;amp;amp; Human Services regulations require patients to have access to their own medical records, and the natural way to grant easy and private access to digital medical records would be through a secure online interface. Yet the biggest users of the public health care system, the elderly, are also the most resistant to adopting the technology that would reduce costs. It may prove worthwhile to incentivize nonconnected households to get broadband just to realize the greater savings of a fully digital, networked healthcare system.  And in a parallel to the New Deal&amp;#039;s Rural Electrification Act, the modern Smart Grid proposed by the new administration is heavily dependant on a persistent two-way flow of data between utilities and residential customers to track electricity usage in real time. I spoke recently with Billy Ray, superintendent of the Glasgow Electric Plant Board in Glasgow, Ky., who refers to the synergy of electrical power service and broadband as &amp;quot;infotricity.&amp;quot; Ray&amp;#039;s municipal electrical service first started rolling out coaxial cables to every house in town in 1988 to allow the utility to remotely read networked electric meters. Since they had installed the coax, they started operating a not-for-profit cable service as well. When the Web gained popularity in 1995, Glasgow rolled out broadband Internet service as well. &amp;quot;We skipped right over dial-up,&amp;quot; says Ray. Now Ray is starting to roll out fiberoptic lines to residences, since he is anticipating a future of intelligent thermostats and other household control systems that are in constant communication with the utility to better manage the local grid&amp;#039;s electrical load. The utility could get the advantage of more efficient operations, and the citizens get the benefit of some of the lowest-cost broadband and cable service in the U.S.  I&amp;#039;m the first to admit that the stimulus package probably wasn&amp;#039;t the best legislative vehicle to fund this through. The money allotted will probably not be that effective as instant economic stimulus, and broadband in many areas may initially be greeted with shrugs of indifference. Those who don&amp;#039;t see the value of the Internet right now might not be much more excited by it just because the price is a bit lower or the service a bit better. But if the money is administered intelligently as a fund to &amp;quot;fill in the blanks&amp;quot; in broadband service\u2014offering faster and cheaper options in markets where competition is low\u2014then we all benefit from the network effects. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3988/4306633/>