It’s about time: US almost gets serious about broadband buildout

After writing about broadband for nearly a decade-and-a-half, it is finally good to see our politicians actually thinking about broadband and connectedness in a thoughtful manner. Almost!

President Barack Obama will sign an order to make the approval process for broadband network buildout on roads and federal property smoother, easier and simpler. The new order solves the following problems:

• In order to approve broadband construction, different federal agencies have different processes.
• The Federal Government owns about 30 percent of the US land, roads and over 10,000 buildings.

The new order will make things simpler by:

• Ensuring that Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Transportation and Veteran Affairs & the US Postal Service develop a single process to approve the Internet construction process.
• The Department of Transportation will make sure that a dig-once policy is in place. So when new roads are being built, the construction teams should include the empty pipes that can house fiber cables instead of having constantly to dig this up. Reps Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) have been big proponents of the “dig once” policy. The dig-once policy is a smart way to ensure that we can see fiber is deployed quickly across the U.S. It should help spread the fiber to far-flung and greenfield locations.