Teresa Mastrangelo says bringing broadband to unserved and underserved areas is going to a complex and lengthy process, should the broadband bill that aims to do just that get approved as expected. But the broadbandtrends analyst says the push to bring broadband to those that don’t have it seems to her pure folly.
xchange: What are your thoughts about the broadband piece of the proposed economic stimulus package now making its way through Congress?
Mastrangelo: I think it’s not that significant. It’s not going to benefit a lot of people in the ways that everyone was hoping for.
I think historically when you use grants as your way of providing funding that the process is very lengthy in order to get access to those funds. And they were very specific even in the stimulus bill with what the requirements were going to be [for] the people that were going to apply for the grants. So I don’t see those things moving very rapidly. There’s a lot of debate over exactly how many homes are unserved by any type of broadband, and if you look at the money that has been set aside basically to provide basic broadband to the unserved, if it’s 6 million homes like they claim it is, there is no way that can even remotely cover 6 million homes.
xchange: So the broadband part of the proposed legislation is around $6 billion?
Mastrangelo: The total number for broadband infrastructure is $5.825 [billion], maybe it’s $5.85 [billion]. The balance of it is money that was set aside for the NTIA to do their broadband mapping project that the FCC had proposed. And of that money, half of it is RUS, half of it is for other broadband deployment — as well as a billion of it is for wireless, mobile broadband — I guess for areas that can’t be served by a fixed infrastructure. So when you really start to look into the numbers it’s just really not that much money.
xchange: Right, but with the move yesterday by the Senate Finance Committee, some say $9 billion is now the number being discussed for broadband in the bill?
Mastrangelo: Apparently the Senate submitted some amendments to the bill that took the value up to $9 billion and included some tax credits. I have not seen this yet, so I can’t make any comments.”
xchange: Either way, some think this stimulus bill was the opportunity to address broadband, and this legislation — as you say — is very limited in both its funding and vision for broadband. Do you expect broader and richer federal broadband legislation in the future?
Mastrangelo: I have different feelings about it, because I personally don’t feel the U.S. has a broadband problem. I just don’t. We have 70-plus million subscribers in this country. Our penetration’s at 60 percent. The availability is pretty darned good considering. Surely it can be better, but we’re looking at somewhere around 88 to 90 percent availability of broadband, which is pretty good. I don’t know that it is ever going to be 100 percent. And then I’d even debate that, because there is satellite broadband that is available.
