President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan is smart to look beyond ports and potholes. But I worry about the part of the plan aimed at expanding broadband. It’s both too ambitious and not ambitious enough. The Biden plan doesn’t ask for enough money. It proposes a $100 billion budget over eight years to close America’s digital divide, similar to a parallel bill in Congress. My research team estimates the budget needs to be at least $240 billion — more than double the current target. An inescapable conclusion is that the plan’s budget is not ambitious enough and has a budget shortfall of $140 billion. At the same time, the Biden plan is too ambitious in its proposed solution. It intends to solve the broadband problem through local public and municipal networks — those that operate without a profit motive. That will be difficult to do, to say the least: Municipal networks are banned in at least 18 states. President Biden will have to work with other, better-resourced parties. He will also have to find new ways to raise revenue to pay for the upgrades to America’s digital infrastructure. I would propose a two-part solution. Both involve Big Tech, the industry that makes the most money from better connectivity. First, consider a “tech tax” to narrow the budget gap. Second, the federal government should partner with the big, for-profit players to bring broadband to disconnected areas — something nonprofit, municipal players can’t realistically do.

[Bhaskar Chakravorti is the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and founding executive director of Fletcher's Institute for Business in the Global Context.]

Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge highlighted the company’s potential to upsell broadband customers as data usage grows but noted it didn’t yet feel the need to pursue a rollout of symmetrical capabilities. The broadband provider saw "significant growth in data usage per internet customer” in Q1 2021, stating this had reached an average of about 700 GB per month. He added nearly 20% of its non-video internet customers are now using a terabyte or more of data per month. Rutledge spotlighted “a lot” of opportunity to upsell customers to higher service tiers, noting the vast majority of its broadband subscriber base was on its base-level product offering 200 Mbps download speeds. “We haven’t done much of that, really. We do it, and obviously, we satisfy the market, but the bulk of our customer base is at the entry-level speed.” CFO Christopher Winfrey highlighted the potential for additional growth opportunities to spring from its previously announced Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) buildout to 1 million new locations. While projects like the one it’s undertaking for RDOF have a higher cost per passing and a longer payback period, they can also create “additional building opportunities on the edge of those networks.” Winfrey added “some of these rural communities, by having broadband, can actually have more fill-in or become more suburban-like, which could open up opportunities which aren’t built into our model.”