Overstatement

There have been a lot of complaints such as this one in the Boston Globe from the Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont lately:

Shumlin offered himself as an example. Data from FairPoint Communications shows the governor's hometown of Putney as wired with high-speed Internet service. Shumlin said that's true in the village, but not out in the hills where he lives.

"That is news to me and my teenage daughters," Shumlin said about data showing his hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuse has DSL, a type of high-speed Internet service. "We need the truth. We can't build out on bad data."

The complaint is well-founded. The federal mapping effort has had the benefit of gettin something down on paper. But in rural areas especially, the strategy taken by NTIA overstates availability. The reason for this is the basic geographic approach taken by the NTIA, an approach that aggregates availability to U.S. Census blocks. Among the problems with this approach is that blocks are not even in size. In urban areas blocks are, well, blocks defined by streets usually. Not so in rural areas where blocks can be quite large.

The bottom line with the basic strategy taken by NITA: aggregating availability data has pitfalls precisely where accuracy is most crucial. Namely, in sparser locations, U.S. Census blocks are large (indeed, those over a certain areal threshold were omitted from the initial map release one presumes for methodological reasons).

In dense areas, generalizing to a more or less arbitrary spatial units makes a certain amount of sense, especially if the units are compact, as blocks tend to be in densely settled areas. But in rural areas, this technique makes less sense because it tends to a) overstate avaialbility and b) deny the granular information needed for strategic decision-making. Aggregating data in this way was a gamibt and maybe a poor one, taken one suspects to avoid drawing a map of discrete actual service areas of individual providers, an approach that would no doubt lead to endless negotiation and litigation.

FCC Commissioner Cashes Out

Okay, okay, it's not as though I expect a former F.C.C. Commissioner to sell all her possessions and walk the Earth like Cain on Kung Fu, but this piece from the WaPo's Cecilia Kang is pretty blatant:

Federal Communications commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker announced Wednesday that she will resign from the FCC on June 3 and join Comcast-NBC Universal as its senior vice president of governmental affairs.

Other Infrastructures: Shuffling High-Speed Rail $$

The Obama administration hoped to commit $53 billion toward developing a high-speed rail network (a mere down payment on the $600 the U.S. High Speed Rail Association says are necessary to complete such a network).

The Washington Post reports today that some of those dollars are being reshuffled:

The Obama administration on Monday announced the reallocation of $2 billion in its signature transportation program to create a national high-speed rail network, including $795 million for upgrades that would permit speeds of 160 mph in parts of the Northeast Corridor.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made the money available to other states this year when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) opted not to accept funds that had been allocated to build high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando.

Glad to hear that Florida's elected leaders maintain their ideological commitment to burning fossil fuels despite their particular vulnerability to rising seas....

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House transportation committee, has been outspoken in his opposition to the administration’s plan to spend $50 billion more for high-speed rail over the next five years.

Mica, who favors a privately funded rail system, was critical Monday of funding for several projects that would benefit Amtrak’s operations in the Northeast Corridor.

“We need a comprehensive, responsible plan for the Northeast Corridor,” he said in a statement, “and Amtrak — our nation’s Soviet-style passenger rail service — is incapable of carrying out a project of this scope and significance.”

Soviet-style. Nice rhetorical flourish. But since the private sector abandoned rail service decades ago, where's the investment going to come from? See any would-be railroad tycoons on the horizon (since they did such a smashing job the first time around!)? No. Okay. So if it's going to happen, it won't start through private investment any time soon.

As an aside: since I worry about the century-old span across the Susquehanna every time I cross it going to and coming from Philly, I'm glad to hear that the reshuffling tosses a dime or two toward replacing it.

NC Senate Votes to Limit Broadband Expansion

Okay, so that's an inflammatory title for this post. But that's precisely what the NC Senate has done in supporting the so-called “Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition”.

Among other restrictions on local government involvement in broadband, the bill limits the footprint of a public network service area to the official corporate limits of that entity as well as imposing operational limits.

This piece in the Davidson News demonstrates the stakes for a small town, attempting to collaborate with neighboring towns to build an inter-jurisdictional network:

The bill’s new rules would require cities and towns to get voter approval for any debt they issue to pay for communications networks. They also would have to hold public hearings on their plans. And since cities and towns are exempt from taxes, they would be required to make payments in lieu of taxes to themselves equal to what a private company would have to pay.

The community's experience with privately provided cable and, later, Internet service is typical of smaller communities across the nation. Davidson, nearby towns, and the surrounding unincorporated reaches of Mecklenburg and Iredell counties experienced the frustration of twenty years of de facto monopoly providers, takeovers, and service limited service, as a previous Davidson News piece explains.

But the NC Senate is not an institution that will allow simple pragmatics, a solid business plan, and the interest of communities stand in the way of an ideological commitment. Let's hope this bill is eventually stopped in its tracks.

The Vermont Senate has voted to speed up the permitting process for towers that will enable high-speed Internet access and cell phone service.

Vermont's challenges are manifold: sparse population, lots of hills and trees. So wireless may be a near term solution, but wifi networks are hard (and expensive) to build in these condition.

The legislation was not without its critics, suspicious of giving too much to the big telcos. As the Brattleboro Reformer reports:

If not, he said, Vermonters will be able to get "all the rock and roll tunes you’ve ever heard of," and be able to ship money out of state to pay for them but they’ll be much less able to upload and send out their own creative work product, MacDonald said.

"Economic development is based on uploading," he said. "This bill is woefully short on uploading technology."

He also said if private companies are getting public dollars to set up new fiber-optic backbones around the state, they should be required to welcome other users, even competitors, onto their networks.

Gauging Broadband's Economic Impacts

Let's hope that Kimberly Weisul is not responsible for writing her own headlines at bnet. Witness a piece from yesterday with the screaming headline: "Study: $7B Stimulus Funds Not Helping Economy".

First let's unpack the premise:

By rolling out broadband internet service, especially to isolated rural areas, the argument goes, we can combat the economic malaise that has plagued many of those areas. Instead, it seems that the benefits of widespread Internet use tend to be concentrated in areas that are already doing relatively well. It’s the techie’s version of “The rich get richer.”

Okay, for what it's worth, if the rich are getting richer, then, strictly speaking we can't claim that the broadband stimulus is having no impact. But that's a minor point.

A tidbit of evidence cited in the piece, however, shows that only a minority of counties have experienced wage and employment growth in the wake of broadband expansion. But the data that substantiate this claim are from 1995-2000. So how on earth can that tentative and dated finding warrant the blithe conclusion that the broadband stimulus (which began almost a decade after the trend identified by a team of researchers) is so far without economic effects. Nonsense.

More importantly, if we pore over large-scale aggregated effects such as wage and employment numbers at the county level we fail to comprehend precisely the localized effects of connectivity. Only a starry-eyed economic development coordinator for a county might hold out hope that a fat pipe will lead directly to large-scale shifts in wage and employment patterns (especially in the long term). And, as the bnet piece suggests, a small and relatively fixed set of locations will benefit the most from connectivity. But that doesn't mean that increasing access and adoption in rural reaches of American isn't without consequence. For instance, perhaps broadband will staunch the steady flow of the best and brightest of rural Americans to the sub- and exurban enclaves to which they presently flock.

But just because a few conurbations stand to benefit the most doesn't in any way lead to the conclusion that broadband expansion is not helping the economy. That's a mischaracterization at best (and more likely ideologically-freighted spin with no toehold in reality).

Finally: Evidence of Planners Cluing In To Broadband!

Planning Commission sees opportunity in short-term broadband goals for comprehensive plan — Technically Philly

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