New minimum speed for US broadband connections

Wed Jun 2 01:27:03 UTC 2021

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 8:48 PM Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu>
wrote:

> On Tue, 01 Jun 2021 10:10:17 -0000, scott said:
> > $10400 / $125 = 84 months or 7 years.
>
> > On the high side: 14 years.
>
> Plus ongoing monthly costs that drags out the break-even.
>
> The big question is how to get a CFO to buy into stuff with a long
> break-even
> schedule when short-term profits get emphasized.  Telcos strung a lot of
> copper
> when they were assured of multiple decades of returns - and even *then*
> getting
> it out to rural areas required providing more incentive....
>

(going to be pretty us-centric, sorry 'not use folks', also this isn't
about valdis's message directly)
There's a bunch of discussion which seems to sideline 'most of the
population' and then
the conversation ratholes on talk about folk that are not grouped
together closely (living in cities/towns).
I think this is a good example of: "Perfect is the enemy of the good" in
that there are a whole
bunch, 82% or so[1], of folk live 'in cities' (or near enough) as of 2019.
If the 'new' standard is 100/100, that'd be perfectly servicable and
deployable to
82% of the population.

Wouldn't it make sense to either:
  1) not offer subsidies to city-centric deployments (or pro-rate those)
  2) get return on the longer-haul 'not city' deployments via slightly
higher costs elsewhere?
       (or shift the subisidies to cover the rural deployments more
completely?)

Yes 'telco' folk will have to play ball, but also they get to keep their
'we do broadband' marketting..
Holding back ~80% of the population because you can't sort the other 20%
out (or a large portion of that 20%)
in a sane manner sure seems shortsighted. I get that trenching fiber down
'state-route-foobar' is hard, and costly,
but throwing up your hand and declaring that 'no one needs XXX mbps' is
more than just a little obstructionist.

1:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269967/urbanization-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=The%20statistic%20shows%20the%20degree,in%20cities%20and%20urban%20areas
.
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