Obama’s Community-Broadband Plan: 4 Ways to Understand His State of the Union Pitch
January 21, 2015
- We Don't Have Enough Broadband Choices: Nearly forty percent of American households either cannot purchase a fixed 10 megabit per second connection or they must buy it from a single provider. And three out of four Americans do not have a choice between providers for Internet at 25 Mbps. Faced with that situation, if a city or county can build its own fast broadband for its taxpayers, why shouldn’t it?
- Muni Broadband Is No Sure Thing: Some publicly owned broadband can fail.
- It's About Competition, Not Speed: I’d rather have 10 providers offer 100 Mbps service than one providing 1 Gbps. And, ideally, municipal broadband would allow that: Your town would build the infrastructure and then wholesale that capacity to other Internet providers.
- It's Foolish to Ban Cities From Trying: The most compelling part of the White House’s newfound community-broadband advocacy could be the hardest to implement: Having the Federal Communications Commission overturn the outright bans and lesser obstacles thrown up against municipal networks in 19 states -- much of the time, in response to extensive statehouse lobbying by Big Telecom.
Obama’s Community-Broadband Plan: 4 Ways to Understand His State of the Union Pitch