Study Touts Broadband Providers' Investments

Broadband for America -- a coalition which includes telecommunications providers such as AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, Time Warner Cable and Verizon -- released a new paper touting what it says are the economic benefits from the investments made by broadband providers and warns against imposing regulations that might hamper such efforts.

"Given the massive investment that has been made to wire the U.S. economy with first-generation broadband access technologies, and given the significant investment now planned by carriers to upgrade that infrastructure to second-generation access technologies, policymakers must be careful to avoid new regulations that would make such investments unattractive," the study's authors, telecom economists Robert Crandall and Hal J. Singer, said in the paper.

The paper says that investments in "first-generation" access technologies including cable modems, DSL and 3G wireless have generated 434,100 jobs between 2003 and 2009. "We estimate that the going-forward capital expenditures in next-generation access technologies would create approximately 509,000 jobs relative to a world without such investments so long as no new regulatory changes undermine the incentives of [broadband service providers] to continue to invest," the paper argued. The study represents the latest salvo from the nation's largest broadband providers, which include the major telecom and cable firms, to push back against calls for the FCC to impose new regulations to ensure open access to the Internet by all content providers and to help spur broadband access and use as part of the national broadband plan being crafted by the FCC.