What Does ‘Universal Broadband’ Really Mean?

There’s been a lot of talk lately over using the upcoming MOASP (mother of all stimulus packages) to promote something called “universal broadband.” Numbers as high as $100 billion have been casually bandied about. While noble sounding, this phrase also sounds suspiciously like “energy independence,” something all politicians profess to want but which remains stubbornly elusive. Just what does “universal broadband” mean?

Most would probably assume it means 100 percent of U.S. households have a broadband connection. Although that may sound like a straightforward definition it’s really not.

There are 128.2 million housing units in the United States. Do politicians intend to string broadband to each of those housing units? That probably wouldn’t make sense since only 110.7 million are occupied.

So, “universal broadband” must mean broadband to each of the 110.7 million occupied homes in the United States. But this also doesn’t really make sense since about 20 percent of U.S. households lack a computer and, therefore, might not find broadband very useful (at least until the “universal computing” act is passed). So this leaves us with about 88 million households with computers.

But this is still misleading. Broadband penetration in the United States is currently just shy of 60 percent, but that’s a percentage of total occupied households, not households with computers. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet that the 60 percent, or 66.4 million, of households with broadband also have computers. This leaves us with 21.6 million households that could conceivable use broadband but do not currently have it.

But, to throw even more cold water on the “universal broadband” thing, according to Pew Internet research, 51 percent of dial-up users simply do not want broadband. With about 11 million dial-up households, this chops 5.6 million households off of our tally.

The result? “Universal broadband” means extending broadband to the 16 million U.S. households that have people living in them, own computers, and want broadband but do not currently have it.

The price? $100 billion, or $6,250 per household. At that price they should be able to get dedicated 10-gigabit Ethernet connections.

I’m all in favor of promoting more investment in broadband infrastructure but the best way to do that is to reduce taxes and regulatory restrictions on those that actually do the investing and build the networks. The worst way to do it is to hand $100 billion to politicians who tie strings to it and then hand it back to telecom operators.

Kevin Walsh is vice president of marketing at Zeugma Systems, which sells gear to allow broadband service providers to identify, monitor, manage and customize traffic flows on a per-service, per-subscriber level.