One sometimes hear it argued that fewer homes will "get internet" because of changes to Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program rule changes. One also hears arguments that increased use of artificial intelligence will reduce critical thinking skills.
Sometimes those arguments are highly questionable. There are other reasons why reality, truthfulness or factuality can be challenged, and it has nothing to do with human critical thinking or using AI. Instead, the issue is vested economic interest.
Advocates for local or state government, for example, have a vested interest in increasing the share of federal resources they can deploy to solve problems. And sometimes they have vested interests in particular ways of solving problems.
Consider arguments for how to bring better home broadband services to rural areas. For decades, the preference has been for a particular solution, namely optical fiber to the home, with opposition to using other arguably more-affordable and immediately-deployable solutions including satellite service and using mobile networks rather than cabled networks.
Nobody disagrees that optical fiber to the home is the most “future proof” solution, providing it is economically feasible. The problem is that feasibility often is precisely the issue.
FTTH Deployment Environment | Typical Homes Passed per Mile | Cost per Mile (All-In)* | Cost per Location (Homes Passed) | Key Cost Drivers |
Urban (High Density) | 80 – 150+ | $50,000 – $100,000 | $500 – $1,200 | Shorter drops, existing duct/conduit, shared trenching, many users per mile |
Suburban (Moderate Density) | 30 – 70 | $40,000 – $80,000 | $1,200 – $2,500 | Mix of aerial and buried, moderate trenching cost, fewer homes per mile |
Rural (Low Density) | 5 – 20 | $25,000 – $60,000 | $3,000 – $10,000+ | Long distances, expensive trenching, new poles/conduit, very few users per mile |
Very-rural areas might require investment so high no payback is possible.
That is the reason a rational argument can be made that FTTH should not be built “everywhere,” and that feasible solutions must include satellite or mobile network access. The argument that “work from home” is not possible unless FTTH is deployed is almost always false.
I have “worked from home, full time” on connections including symmetrical gigabit per second broadband and on connections offering less than 100 Mbps downstream and single digits upstream. My work has never been adversely affected.
To be sure, my work does not routinely involve upgrading large files on a sustained basis. But most of us do not require a home-based server role, do not create long-form 4K video content all day and need to upload those files continually.
So if it is said that changes to BEAD rules mean “fewer households will get high speed internet,” the statement is misleading or false. Fewer households might get internet access using FTTH, but that does not mean they will not get internet. And whether such access is “high speed” or not depends on the definitions we choose to use.
Beyond that, “high speed” might not actually provide any user-perceivable advantage beyond a few hundred megabits per second in the downstream direction. Whether it makes any difference in the upstream direction might be a more-relevant issue, but even there, actual users might not find their work from home impeded.
We sometimes forget that society has any number of pressing problems to be solved, and internet access is just one of those problems. Investments we make in any area have opportunity costs: we cannot spend the money to solve additional problems.
Any engineering problem involves choices. Any allocation of societal resources likewise requires choices. Those choices have consequences.
It is a perfectly logical and appropriate issue to suggest that serving more people, right now, is a value as great as serving them with a particular solution or capability. Likewise, being efficient in the use of public resources also is a value we tend to believe makes sense. Virtually nobody ever advocates “waste, fraud and abuse.”
But as a practical matter, it might well be a waste of scarce resources to insist on one particular solution for all home broadband requirements, when other workable solutions exist.
For every public purpose there are corresponding private interests. Critical thinking might be said to aid decision making when scarce resources must be committed. And that critical thinking might include weighing claims that certain approaches mean “fewer homes will get internet,” when the truth is that the claim only means “fewer homes will get internet using FTTH:
in areas where other providers already exist
where there are locations that might not actually require access (an area might have business users but no home users)
there are other reasons why subsidized service will still be available
In areas too expensive to serve using FTTH.
In our justified zeal to ensure that critical thinking skills are not diminished by AI, we should not forget that critical thinking skills often are ignored when vested interests interpret reality in ways that serve those interests.
