Cities and broadband, next administration edition

[Commentary] The federal government has often played a major role in the country’s infrastructure development. With a President who promised federal support for improving infrastructure, we will soon see how the new administration proposes to do so. Based on their approaches to markets broadly, the new administration’s broadband policies are likely to lead to significant deregulation, tax changes, and merger activity that will affect the private sector’s appetite for infrastructure-related investment.

Still, infrastructure deployment is largely dependent on the efforts and policies of cities. In the early part of the last century, cities were the gravitational center for efforts to create the electrical, water, sewer, transportation, and lighting infrastructure required for economic growth and social progress in that time. Subsequently, while telephone service was largely addressed at the state and federal level, cities dealt with the deployment of cable networks and the cellular towers. In the last decade cities have been at the cutting edge of creating a more hospitable environment for deploying gigabit capable networks.

[is the third in a trilogy of blogs discussing the state of broadband policy as a new administration and Congress begins.]