As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program and the Broadband Initiatives Program will be together paying a total of $7.2 billion to fund private efforts for delivering broadband to “unserved” or “underserved” areas. Unserved refers to areas where at least nine out of ten households don’t have what the government is calling the minimum requirements for broadband, and underserved refers to places where half of households do not have service of at least 3 Mbps down, or places where less than two-fifths of households do not subscribe to broadband.
We at TG are happy to see that to be eligible to receive funds, you must promise to abide by the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement, which means consumers are free to use whatever device they want to get online, and that providers can’t throttle bandwidth (so none of those application-crippling shenanigans allowed). Providers will have to deal with illegal online content (which is presumably the new PC term for child porn), but the other parts of the IPS suggest that violating net neutrality is not an acceptable way of doing this.
The only problematic part is the definition of broadband, which is at least 768 kbps down and 200 kbps up, which is a step above the old definition of 200 kbps down, but is still nothing given the high-bandwidth activities we have these days. That said, the government necessarily needed a lower standard definition for broadband. If, for example, a 3 Mbps downstream connection had been required, that would have meant that the infrastructure would go towards helping a smaller number of people, albeit with better connections than they are getting under this scheme.
So this effort, considering that parts of America still have no broadband, are a start, and a good one at that as it focuses on laying the initial infrastructure for the areas that still have dial-up if anything. The fast-talkin’ city folk may still be complaining about how Comcast is the only provider which has even made a pledge about rolling out IPv6 support, but at this point, it’s mission-critical that we get everyone online. If people do not want to use the internet, that is there choice, but they need to be in a position where they can actually choose.
(Original story via Ars Technica)
