81–90 of 114 posts
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I'm asking about the economic benefits to GDP of rolling out broadband to the places that don't yet have it, considering that they can get satellite.
There are a lot of things you can't do on satellite internet right now. VOIP is the most obvious example.
Possible my numbers are wrong, but based on the "1% of the project cost" appears this will cost 3.5 billion dollars in total; $305 billion total cost [1] * 1% of total = three billion fifty million for "dig once" [1] "Congress passed the five-year, $305 billion “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act” on Dec. 3, 2015, and President Obama signed the bill the next day."
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The "dig once" policy is a public subsidy for broadband in the same sense that a national roads network is a subsidy for FedEx or Amazon.com -- it indeed reduces the costs that operators need to pay to get into the market but there's a panoply of benefits to the public beyond those of a literal, "paying government money to broadband operators" subsidy.
Infrastructure, whether broadband or highways, has positive externalities that are hard for infrastructure builders to capture, so the free market under-invests in infrastructure. However, government investment in infrastructure also is distortionary and needs to be considered in every instance. For example, it's great that we can get products delivered overnight from Amazon. However, as you point out, that is effect…
[1] http://www.frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/do-roads-pay-themsel...
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There are a lot of things you can't do on satellite internet right now. VOIP is the most obvious example.
SpaceX's planned satellite network could fix that eventually… if it's ever actually constructed.
Honest question. Is there something better/faster than fibre that they should be laying instead? Seems like fiber is just enough to catch up, but we'd rather get ahead.
I would also like to know. Google gave me this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/02/11/scientists-...
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According to some sensationalist stories I've read, it's only ~10X what we're spending to protect/transport President Trump on his weekend vacations.
What does this contribute to the conversation?
Honest question. Is there something better/faster than fibre that they should be laying instead? Seems like fiber is just enough to catch up, but we'd rather get ahead.
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I think the government here is taking a good approach by putting down at least empty pipes , which can be filled by anyone who wants to run fiber through them. This is a reasonable compromise in my opinion. Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out, while also giving others the ability to pull their own lines through the pipes.
>> which can be filled by anyone who wants to run fiber through them. No, there is only so much space in the pipe. It has a limited capacity so the next logical step is to charge for access. >> Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out... At that point why not just have the government be an ISP an route any and all packets that come their way? See, they're proposing to take care of the h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the government here is taking a good approach by putting down at least empty pipes , which can be filled by anyone who wants to run fiber through them. This is a reasonable compromise in my opinion. Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out, while also giving others the ability to pull their own lines through the pipes.
>> which can be filled by anyone who wants to run fiber through them. No, there is only so much space in the pipe. It has a limited capacity so the next logical step is to charge for access. >> Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out... At that point why not just have the government be an ISP an route any and all packets that come their way? See, they're proposing to take care of the h…