July 2022

There's a plan to make sure everyone in Colorado has access to high-speed internet. The state just received $500 million from the American Rescue Plan to make it happen. The reality is so many of our neighbors in rural counties and even in parts of Colorado Springs can not get access to broadband internet. For those who can, it may be expensive or unreliable; the Advance Colorado Broadband Grant Program will help put an end to that.

Through the “huge” growth of internet traffic, Big Tech is “forcing” phone companies to invest heavily in improving networks while not helping to meet the cost, said Orange SA CEO Christel Heydemann. “We are condemned to invest in infrastructure,” Heydemann said. She added that network traffic is expected to “multiply by three or five” times in the next six years. That huge growth is “essentially captured by a few players, the big content providers, five players that force us to invest,” she added.

Comparisons between US and European broadband prices abound, but their respective markets are built on such entirely different cost structures as to make any comparison between the two meaningless without accounting for the differences in necessary expenditures. A longstanding narrative that US broadband prices are exorbitantly higher than their European peers’ buttresses claims of European superiority and calls for similar unbundling requirements and regulated competition in the U.S telecom industry.