The national broadband plan that the Federal Communications Commission submits to Congress later this month is now expected to cost up to $25 billion. But since the nation's lawmakers are looking for ways to reduce the national debt, the FCC is seeking ways to offset the cost through spectrum auctions and other measures.
To have any chance of meeting its goal of providing broadband service to 100 million Americans, the FCC will need to find support for an estimated $9 billion commitment to cover underserved parts of the country, industry observers say. Moreover, the commission wants Congress to spend $12.5 billion to $16 billion over the next 10 years to provide police, firefighters and other emergency workers with wireless Internet access.
"This will better enable public safety to expand upon commercial deployments and obtain the level of coverage they need," wrote Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC's public-safety and homeland security bureau, in a blog. "The end result will be an advanced, widely available, and robust wireless broadband network for the nation's first responders."
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday that the billions of dollars required to implement the national broadband plan must be weighed against the escalating costs that will arise if a large number of Americans continue to be excluded from the broadband economy.
"Five years ago if you wanted to find a job, you got a newspaper and checked the classifieds; now you have to be online," Genachowski told The Washington Post in a video interview. "And as we make progress on making medical records electronic, the costs of not being connected" to the Internet are going "to get higher."
Moreover, studies from the Brookings Institute, MIT, the World Bank, and others "all tell us the same thing," Genachowski noted in a speech before the National...
Posted: 2010-03-03 14:04:36
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