US allocates $42B in broadband funding—find out how much your state will get
US allocates $42B in broadband funding—find out how much your state will get
Texas and California lead way as 19 states will get at least $1 billion each.
How about a new policy all of us should advocate for:
Every time we bail out or give public money to corporation, the public should own the share of that company. If public own enough share of that company, it should automatically be turned into a utility.
Wait a second. Didn’t we already give these companies money to upgrade their infrastructure??
Yup, we just funded their new yacht without getting anything in return.
Sheesh I thought this was uplifting news until I thought about this perspective. I hope there is some sort of language in these grants that will hold ISPs at least a little bit accountable to build out actual networks.
I'm lucky to live in a town that has municipal broadband, so I pay a reasonable rate for gigabit fiber and it's owned by my town so there's less of a profit motive and no need to appease shareholders by cutting corners or using unfair pricing. I wonder if some of the funds from this program coukd be used by more towns to set up their own ISPs like that.
I believe that they followed the letter of the commitment and ran fiber from hub to hub, but did nothing to take it to the last mile and let it all sit there. Google bought up a bunch of it for their Google fiber ISP. Google HQ in Manhattan sits stop one of these fiver hubs.
Didn't we already fund this shit?
Time Warner Cable reported 97% profit on broadband before. They don't need anymore money.
But now they have to compete with Starlink, thats not fair is it?
We fund it every couple of years and constantly give the telcos tax breaks on piles of things like utility easements or looking the other way on a multitude of issues. For example, Verizon simply pre-pays for double-parking violations in NYC. In the end the telcos still flogging DSL on lines the government has funded for upgrades to fiber several times over.
Don't forget tricks like how if a single house has minimal broadband then the entire zip code is considered "served".
Why does this headline read like some kind of clickbait advertisement?