Advocates disagree on broadband stimulus

The U.S. government should provide money for broadband deployment in an upcoming stimulus package, several groups said Friday, but the broadband advocates couldn't agree on how the money should be spent.

A couple of speakers at a broadband stimulus forum Friday called for the government to give grants to broadband providers to roll out service to unserved or underserved areas. Another speaker called for tax credits, saying a grant program would take months to set up.

Another speaker suggested that none of the broadband money in the US$825 billion stimulus package being pushed by President-elect Barack Obama should go to large incumbent telecom and cable companies that now provide a huge majority of the broadband connections in the U.S.

"I'm fundamentally opposed to taxpayer dollars going to absentee-owned networks, unless there's no hope of a local, community-based network emerging," said Wally Bowen, executive director of the Mountain Area Information Network, a nonprofit broadband provider in western North Carolina. "Local networks are going to create local jobs; they're not going to outsource their tech support to India."

Bowen and other advocates of government broadband spending spoke at a New America Foundation event the day after the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee recommended $6 billion in broadband deployment spending as part of the larger economic stimulus package. The House version of the stimulus package bill would include $2.8 billion for the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to give out as grants and loans to broadband providers.

In addition, the House bill would give another $2.8 billion to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for broadband deployment grants, with $1 billion of that money going to wireless broadband projects. An additional $350 million would go toward a national program to map areas that don't have broadband.

About 25 percent of the NTIA broadband grants would go to areas without broadband, and 75 percent to areas with limited broadband options, according to the bill. The money going to unserved areas would focus on providing basic broadband service of more than 5Mbps of downstream speed for wired broadband or basic wireless broadband.

In order to quality for the 75 percent of the money going to underserved areas, a wired broadband provider would have to deploy service offering 45Mbps downstream speed, and a wireless broadband provider would have to provide 3Mbps of downstream speed.

Both the NTIA and RUS money would require providers to abide by net neutrality rules, which would prohibit them from blocking or slowing any type of legal Web content.

But the speed and net neutrality rules could limit the number of broadband providers that apply for the grants and loans, said Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C., think tank.

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