Broadband Superhighway: We can build it, but will they come?
F2C speaker Sascha Meinrath and The New America Foundation is in the news again with a report entitled Building a 21st Century Broadband Superhighway: A Concrete Build-out Plan to Bring High-Speed Fiber to Every Community. In this report, the authors describe
a fundamental commitment to building an open and accessible high-speed links, allowing a multitude of service providers and services to utilize the infrastructure on a wholesale, non-discriminatory basis, and ensuring that this public investment is as beneficial as possible to the maximum number of potential users.
From the report:
The 21st Century Broadband Superhighway initiative would fund and mandate the installation of high-capacity, dark fiber bundles along all federally-subsidized and direct federal highway projects, thus creating over time a fully interconnected, public access fiber infrastructure to bring high-speed connectivity to every community served by these highways.
While this report offers a workable proposal, an article in Ars Technica, Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don’t want it, points out that
Pew’s Internet & American Life Project reminds us that a hardcore contingent of holdouts won’t, no matter how cheap or how fast the connection is.
What will become of the Info Superhighway? Come to F2C to explore these views and more!
