"What we discovered when we went out there is that 90 percent of people had broadband available to them, but a much smaller percentage actually were subscribing to service," says Blair Levin, former executive director of the National Broadband Plan, and now a fellow at the Aspen Institute.
"Affordability was a factor for some people, but the larger issue has to do with relevance," says Levin.
That's a big deal. If one assumes the "problem" is "product availability," one set of actions is warranted. If one assumes "product demand" is the issue, then different solutions are necessary.
The plan actually found that "ability to buy" was not the big issue. Rather, demand was the issue. "Even though there are a lot of low-income people who may not be able to afford multichannel video (cable TV), there is still a high proportion of people subscribing to the service," Levin says. But the cost of service is not the biggest issue.
"The big difference between TV and broadband is that to watch TV, you don't have to be literate," Levin says. "The same is true of phone service. You don't need to be literate to use a cell phone, so penetration of those services is higher."
The implication is that once citizens and consumers see the value and relevance, they buy. But that's a different problem than "I want to buy, but cannot because there are no facilities."
There are some areas, mostly rural, where sheer access is an issue. But that problem is a "targeted" problem that can be overcome by a relatively targeted approach to new facilities.
"We can solve about 90 percent of the broadband access problem for a relatively small amount of money, like around $10 billion," Levin says. "Of course, if you tried to solve 100 percent of the problem, it would be more difficult and more expensive."
In a capital-intensive undertaking, getting the last couple of percentage points of improvement is hugely expensive, unless one is flexible about the methods used to solve the problem, in other words. In some cases, building landline facilities is not economically rational, since there already exist other ways to deliver service to the last couple of percent of potential users using satellite services, while terrestrial wireless might make sense for five percent of locations.
Neither private industry nor governments anymore have the luxury of solving access problems with one single approach, no matter what the cost.
1 comment:
Here is a person that had all the answers and does not even know what the questions are. He had told some that it would be cheaper to move the people to BB than to build BB to the people. He had got his head in the sand or sand in his head. We do not need all these government entities building there own private so called open networks with government moneies when the service providers could provide the same services for much less money and offer services to everyone. Most places that do not have BB of some type are where the RBOC's have rural areas that they can not make a business case to build.
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