The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has awarded $1.5 billion in support for rural internet access services, intended to upgrade some 713,000 locations, at an average subsidy of $2103 per location.
As always is the case, the small percentage of very-rural locations have per-line capital investment costs far above those of urban and suburban locations.
The most isolated 250,000 U.S. homes of the seven million that in 2010 did not have fixed network internet access (or did not meet a minimum 4 Mbps downstream speed), representing about 3.5 percent of those locations, require 57 percent of the capital required to connect all seven million locations.
“The highest-gap 250,000 housing units account for $13.4 billion of the total $23.5 billion investment gap,” an FCC paper has estimated.
“Our analysis indicates that there are seven million housing units (HUs) without access to terrestrial broadband infrastructure capable of meeting the National Broadband Availability Target of 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload,” the FCC said in its Broadband Availability Gap technical paper.
Created in support of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, the document says simply that “because the total costs of providing broadband service to those seven million HUs exceed the revenues expected from providing service, it is unlikely that private capital will fund infrastructure.”
Cost and density are inversely related, the FCC noted. The density pattern follows a basic Pareto rule, that 80 percent of the population lives in perhaps 20 percent of the land area.
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