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Mapping the US Genome... Broadband Style

I'm not a huge fan of government intervention, but the House of Representatives did something that I'm pretty impressed with. They passed "The Broadband Census of America Act" to map out the penetration of broadband access in the US. The goal of this bill is to determine exactly which areas of the US are underserved by the "broadband" industry. Now let's see exactly what they attempt to do with that information.

Scientia potentia est

is roughly translated as "knowledge is power". If the Congress attempts to use this mapping of the broadband footprint in the US to "level the playing field" of broadband, I think that they are doing a disservice. The Congress should be concerned about enabling telecom service providers to innovate and not making them hold back the deployment of faster services until every county in ( insert sparsely populated Qwest state here... ) has 1.5mb of service.

On the other hand, if they use this map to determine where USF like resources can be best used and/or to shame the telecom service providers into getting broadband access into underserved areas, I am ALL for it. Verizon can take some of that FiOS budget and make sure that upstate New York is just as well served as Manhattan…. By the way, that goes for AT&T supporting Yuba City north to the Oregon border just as well as they do in downtown SFO.

Technorati Tags: Telecommunications, Telecom, Broadband Access, USF, Universal Service Fund, US House of Representatives

  Posted by jmyers on October 12, 2007 8:00 AM |

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