Ball State University's broadband stimulus plan is the only one being considered by Congress that delivers technology to rural areas AND immediately creates jobs nationwide. Here they share their ideas.
Improving rural access to broadband telecommunications is an admirable goal. The nation also looks to short-term fiscal stimulus of the lagging economy. One proposal does both of these.
"The Rural Broadband Initiative: Deploying Next-Generation Broadband Service to Rural America," a white paper from Ball State's Digital Policy Institute (DPI), recommends funding broadband deployment by providing short term funding to existing rural telephone companies who then provide broadband service to rural areas.
There are significant, and widely agreed upon benefits of extending broadband technology. These include economic development, reduced costs of government services and improved quality of life. Today over 4 million U.S. households, primarily in rural areas, have no access to affordable broadband infrastructure.
The Universal Service Fund (USF) provides annual funding to local telephone companies in rural areas to offset the high cost of telephone service. But, even with this funding, rural areas have continued to lag behind, primarily in necessary network upgrades that permit rural residents to also interact with web 2.0 applications.
In each of the past two months the U.S. economy has shed more than 500,000 jobs. The incoming Obama administration is attempting to craft a fiscal stimulus package that will simultaneously provide short-term stimulus – hopefully by the end of winter – and long-term infrastructure enhancements. Improving the nations’ telecommunications network is a significant part of this stimulus plan.
It was no surprise to industry insiders that Ball State was able to craft this plan. The university was one of the first institutions to pioneer WiMAX testing in the United States, and it recently announced a $17.7 million Emerging Media Initiative, establishing Ball State as a leader in the emerging media industry.
Unfortunately, any new plan that requires identification of needs and creation of a funding mechanism will require many months, if not years to implement. Even for worthy projects, the delay is too long to provide fiscal stimulus in 2009.
Our proposal would provide next-generation broadband service to roughly 5.9 million access sites in the United States. This would create more than 200,000 jobs – in manufacturing of fiber optics and other telecommunications equipment, construction, engineering, installation of fiber optic networks and customer premise equipment. This would account for roughly 7 percent of the jobs envisioned under the stimulus plan, at a cost of about $28 billion or just 3.5 percent of the total cost. This is among the most efficient of the stimulus package elements.
Most importantly, this program creates jobs this winter.
Using the existing USF mechanism for identifying rural regions, this plan bypasses both the Federal and State bureaucracies and goes directly to the private sector companies who buy fiber optic line (made in America), construction equipment (made in America) and hire workers to install fiber optic lines. These private sector companies will scramble to create these new jobs because their profitability is enhanced by providing broadband services.
There will be a number of stimulus proposals that are good – and a number that are bad. There will be few that create jobs when we need them: right now. Ball State's proposal is fast, will create jobs by mid-March and provides millions of Americans access to our most fundamental technologies of the 21st century.
