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Rural Broadband Gets Boost From Phone-Fund Proposal
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:59:06 -0800
________________________________________ From: Bob Frankston [Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com] Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 3:59 PM To: David Farber Cc: johnl () iecc com Subject: Rural Broadband Gets Boost From Phone-Fund Proposal Slowly we seem to be moving towards allowing some of the problematic Universal Service Fund to be used for connectivity. While I have reservations about “broadband” it’s still a major step not-backward to use it for more than more of that Olde Tyme Telephony. Perhaps some local phone companies will be able to be proactive and do more than just DSL but move towards providing a connected infrastructure using the existing copper as an economical first step. Or is that expecting too much? I apologize for the wording – but I’ve already written about why the USF is a problem and why we need to do more than just broadband. The premise of the premise of USF is homeopathic – if it looks like telephony it must be used to cure telephony. I’ve also compared it to taxing yellow paint to subsidize corn farmers. Connectivity is a first order “good” and should be funded transparently as basic simple infrastructure. Still, I do appreciate the incremental improvement over limiting the use of the fund to pay for telephony. The premise that telephony is expensive and that taxing it won’t make it that much more expensive. The problem is that telephony is now nothing more than an application which has essentially no cost above the basic connectivity. Thus the USF is a $7,000,000,000 hole in the economy that is used to prevent the use of telephony facilities for connectivity. Simply removing that restriction would represent a great step forward. Rural Broadband Gets Boost From Phone-Fund Proposal By COREY BOLES (Wall Street Journal) November 24, 2007; Page A4 WASHINGTON -- To accelerate development of broadband Internet services in rural and poor areas, policy makers who oversee the $7 billion fund that subsidizes telephone service recommended using the pool to help build broadband networks in those expensive-to-reach areas of the country [cid:image001.gif@01C83045.5C203370]WSJ.com - Rural Broadband Gets Boost From Phone-Fund Proposal<http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=611368508>* This article will be available to non-subscribers of the Online Journal for up to seven days after it is e-mailed. http://www.frankston.com/public ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Rural Broadband Gets Boost From Phone-Fund Proposal David Farber (Nov 26)