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New US Broadband Projects Get $795 Million In Funding
snydeq writes "The Obama administration has announced nearly $795 million in grants and loans to 66 new broadband projects across the nation. The subsidies — to be doled out by the US NTIA and the US Rural Utilities Service — will bring broadband service to 685,000 businesses, 900 health-care facilities, and 2,400 schools, according to officials. The NTIA will award $404 million to 29 projects, and the grants will finance 6,000 miles of new fiber-optic lines. Most of the money will finance middle-mile broadband network projects. The RUS will award $390.9 million, with $163 million in loans and the rest in grants. Most of the RUS money is focused on last-mile broadband projects."
How much of this will end up in the pockets of a telco exec and leave us with nothing to show for it?
You know like every other time we have given these bastards a dime.
So... $800 million. Alright. How does that compare to profits major telecoms acquired since they got their first boost in the 90s?
So will there be a way to tax the ISPs or somehow work out a deal so that they can use the fiber in exchange for reducing monthly rates? Or are we simply giving them something for free?
Great, hundreds of millions more out the door when we are already deeply in the hole as a notion. It's a broadband stimulus package!
You want to help out broadband in the U.S.? Make it illegal for communities to have only single providers of service. That would open the doors to competition and reduce prices for everyone, not just the handful of districts this federal boondoggle will target.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there any penalty for the telcos (such that they have to pay this money back, with penalties) if they fail to meet the goals this time around?
Last time we gave them money we didn't get what we paid for, and they just shrugged their shoulders.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... and I'm tempted to steal a quote from someone else.
"It's Tuesday, get a rope!"
I grew up on a farm in a rural community. Up until last year, my family only had access to 56k (at best) dial up service, now they have a 1MB cable service. I really would love to see all citizens in the US be able to access high speed internet but I understand how high those costs are. Personally, I'd like to see more work done in rural areas utilizing wireless broadband. Similar to the speed of the rise of cell phones in modern society. High speed internet isn't the luxury it once was. In many ways, it has become a lifeblood for a new US and a new global economy. The only problem I have is how are they going to track this money to make sure it doesn't go to line the pockets of telecos.
Most of the RUS money is focused on last-mile broadband projects
Rodents of unusual size? I didn't even know they had funding!
Captcha: pedant
Group of companies: Where are the millions you promised us?
Government: 404? Not found!
The top goal for the grants and loans "is to put Americans back to work immediately, managing projects, digging the trenches, laying fiber-optic cable, and stringing up those utility poles," said Gary Locke, secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the parent agency of the NTIA.
I thought that the New Deal actually worsened the pre-WWII economic situation in retrospect. Not sure why this seems like a good idea now.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
I hope that this will affect us somehow.
I work in Silicon Valley, right by two major freeways (880 and 101... so not far out there) and just a couple miles from Cisco, and the best normal service we have is crappy AT&T DSL at 2Mbps down and 0.4 Mbps up.
Meanwhile, 5 minutes away, at my home, I have a 30Mb down 10Mb up connection.
I would like to be able to VPN into work without it crawling along, or without us having to shell out something expensive for business class service. We don't need guaranteed uptime or anything fancy, just a faster connection for day to day stuff.
There have been times where I've driven home to download a 3GB file because it was faster than waiting for it to happen at work.
I will be thrilled when >10Mbit broadband becomes the standard.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
And if the chorus of idiots will realize that this is the best and quickest way of creating jobs, maybe the American economy would have a chance if they could just shut up for 10 minutes.
Our WWII spending brought us to 120% of GDP for our national debt, but it only worked out in the end because it gave all sectors of the economy a living wage, practically creating the middle class. (That and Patriotism back in those days included paying taxes and buying War Bonds.) Double points if those jobs improve American infrastructure and make our economy more efficient at using resources.
Coincidentally, this is the way every successful business operates. You borrow money to invest in capital, and pay it back with the benefits that capital brings you.
If the continued destruction of the middle class isn't ended, and progressive taxes are never brought back, we're going to end up with an income distribution that looks like a third world country. It's going to be tough to sell products a bunch of people who are barely making ends meet, but I guess if you've already got money, at least that second gardner came at half the price.
Oh boy, yet another Obama re-election slush fund. I wonder how much of that will actually make it to 'stimulating' broadband access?
-- Massachusetts Technology Park: This $45.4 million grant, with an additional $26.2 million from the applicant, will lay 1,300 miles of fiber in western Massachusetts. The project will bring broadband to more than 1 million people and 44,000 businesses.
Great give the computer geeks fiber so they can be cocky little guido Massholes too!
I'm not a fan of monopolies or anything, however if not for monopolies on "public utilities", then you'd have to have multiple runs of cable (impractical and physically destructive)
Actually it's not that destructive when you are talking last-mile solutions.
As an example, I used to live in a small community that had Comcast cable. We had a small provider come in, Wide Open West, that had fiber to the curb - the last few hundred feet was coax, delivered side by side with the traditional cable and then at my house one cable attachment replaced the other.
The benefit? I got a 100Mb/s internet feed - that was up and down, about 10x faster than Comcast internet and a 20-30x faster uplink. And it was ten years ago...
The practical reality is that you're not going to have a handful of providers running cable or wires to your house, because if there's more than three people competing for service it doesn't make as much economic sense to have a fourth come in since there's already competition lowering prices. And if any of them fold other companies can come along and make use of the infrastructure. It doesn't mean your neighborhood will look like pre-switch NYC with cables clouding the sky...
If you're wondering what happened to WOW, they got bought out and that was the end of THOSE shenanigans, offering cheap fast internet was simply not allowable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hope this goes as planned another stimulus package that hopefully works. Last 2 have not done that much.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
There's nothing I love more than "independents" using quotes to pretend they are "thinking" instead of spouting partisan bullshit.
Because conservatives oppose the ideas of the New Deal on principle, a lot of Conservatives have attempted to make that argument. However, very few historians and only about a quarter of economists feel that way. When you consider that Economics is one of the great bastions of conservative academic thought... it's not a particularly convincing statistic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_deal#Prolonged.2Fworsened_the_Depression
Also, what timeOday said.
Comcast, Cox, Verizon, AT&T Execs Get $795 Million In Funding.
Fixed your headline free of charge.
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You can argue in 1996, fixing line quality was the right thing to do. Broadband technologies were still in their infancy, vanishingly few people had them. Most people were on dialup. What would show them the biggest benefit? Fixing the phone lines. That would show an immediate increase, and using a proven technology.
While it is nice to talk up future technologies, you have no idea how that'll pan out.
795 Million $ for me ? Cool. We only live about 20 minutes outside of Tacoma, WA and we have no internet (cable, DSL or wireless) cell phone hardly work, dont even have cable tv on our street. Just dial up or satellite. We have satellite but its about 80$ a month and goes out several times a day for 2-20 minutes. Also has a daily download limit of 350mb.
Honestly, assertions are my favorite. It makes arguments so easy to win.
Yes and when WW2 was over (1945), the Depression snapped right back and people were jobless again.
No, unemployment rates stayed low and and GDP did not drop. So the real question is, are you purposefully ignorant or just being a troll?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_unemployment_rates_1950_2005.png
http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=230
Also there's nothing productive about a war, which is basically equivalent to building a bunch of products and then blowing them up. A war is *destructive* not productive. It wastes resources and money and labor hours. It's the Glazier Paradox - smashing windows just to make work. It would be wiser not to smash the windows in the first place.
War is enormously profitable for the winning country, especially when you get to control precious resources as a result. The Glazier Paradox does not apply - we were smashing millions of dollars of weapons into things we didn't repair with our own money. WWII involved a lot of nation building, and our workers provided the manufacturing for most of the planet since Europe and Japan were in pieces. (Not that I agree this is the way to come out of the recession, but it is important to remember history amid your vague rhetoric involving paradoxes.)
Similarly throwing a bunch of money at fiber installs, without considering whether the market will use them, or whether they will just sit unused (dark fiber) is about the same as building a bunch of bridges that lead to nowhere (don't connect to roads). That too is a waste.
Mass transit and communications infrastructure are investments in the future. Even if it there's a bit of waste here and there, it beats giving it to the financial industry, who do nothing useful for the economy at large.
This is the purpose of government. Keep the economic machine running by ignoring the rules when they stop working. Keep income equality high so there's meritocracy instead of aristocracy. Enforce policies to make sure that the economy is well educated and capable of performing complex functions to yield good results for investment.
The relative power of federal, state, and local governments is something that can be argued, but the larger point still remains.
Nicely cherry picked data. I like how you conveniently left out that the top 10% have seen their income rise from $172,000 in 1980 to $339,000 in 2005 - that's a nice doubling of their income. The top 1% did even better - from $517,000 in 1980 to $1,558,000 in 2005. That seems like pretty good economic progress.
And how did the middle class do? From $51,000 to $58,000. Lower Class? $34,000 to $37,000. Lowest Class? $15,700 to $15,900.
So we know why the top 10% are paying all the taxes: they make all the money. And they pay lower tax rates! From 37% for the Top 1% to 31%, the top 5% from 31.8% to 28.9%.
http://www.econdataus.com/efftax05.html
A quarter of a billion dollars to rural utilities so Joe Blow in North Dakota can have fibre to the curb, but congress can't manage to pass an unemployment extension that will allow the CHILDREN of over 3 million jobless Americans to EAT tonight. Near term, long term, I don't care... this is NOT where we need to be spending what little funds we have. I'm pretty sure Joe Blow would rather feed his kids tonight and dial up to check his Farmville, than have fibre and starve. Will it create jobs? Sure. How much longer are we going to look 10 years into the future when we have the problem RIGHT NOW?
...if they don't fight "piracy" will come later.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So..We give 80% of this directly to Verizon, ATT and co. Wouldnt it be a better idea to maybe, oh..I don't know, Secure what we already have and make friking Email usable and actually go after the phishers and frauds out there? I guess a better question is why I don't see eye to eye with politicians? I mean- I've got money, they have pockets... We should get along great.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I like how you conveniently left out that the top 10% have seen their income rise from $172,000 in 1980 to $339,000 in 2005 - that's a nice doubling of their income.
Did you use nominal dollars or something corrected for inflation?
Given that the value of money as measured by the consumer price index (and a number of other measures) dropped by more than half in that time (DESPITE advances in manufacturing technology that SHOULD have made stuff CHEAPER) your numbers suggest that even the despised rich ended somewhat behind where they started.
They ran a Red Queen's Race and didn't quite run hard enough to stay in the same place.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oops. I see that source DID use constant dollars. So it says what you claimed.
= = = =
I note, however, that it does not address the real point of the original statistic: That essentially half the electorate pays no taxes. That's the tipping point for the classic collapse of a democracy or republic: When the majority votes for ever more goodies stolen from the producing classes, who then throw in the towel and stop producing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So we know why the top 10% are paying all the taxes: they make all the money.
You mean they make all the money among wage-earners. That makes them richer than I am, but not rich. The rich do not have wages to tax. Their money comes from economic rent and political maneuvering; it is taxed lightly by comparison.
These aren't just telco grants. Two of today's four grants go to rural telcos. One goes to a university consortium, the other to a state agency that will compete with the telcos. The Bells don't play in this pen.
Yes and no. We have natural resources, but the bureaucracy expense and unending red tape, the lack of speedy decisions, the sheer expense of supporting government workers for life at mostly higher than private sector pay..all of that would help to en-screw the US, especially when/if we lost exclusive world reserve currency status. When that happens, and it will, it's coming, that's it, the party is over, the US will de-evolve into second world status within a few short years, tops. We are just way too top heavy, way too many non producers who need high level incomes.
We have been having a super emergency disaster in the gulf, even with that impetus the fed response has been beyond dismal in speeding things up and cutting redtape to get stuff done. If something of this magnitude can't get them in gear and to get efficient..nothing will, absolutely nothing. It's just too far gone to fix, IMO, collapse is inevitable at this point. Economic, social, all of the above.
Right now we are down to maybe 1/5th of the adult population actually produces real wealth, they are supporting the whole thing. And that is only because the rest of the planet still takes greenbacks as something of worth. As soon as they want harder currency, even the 1/5th still producing wealth here won't be able to support everyone else, especially the millions of government workers. You can see it on smaller scales with most of the states now, they simply cannot function with a ten percent or higher unemployment rate. Governmental expense have grown too large, and you simply can't plop everyone at some 90% tax rate to make up for that. Our wealthiest state, California, broke as can be. This is supposed to be our bragger state, the best, with much higher incomes that most other places, especially for such a large population-broke, can't even cover what has already been spent in advance, let alone anything new.
I sincerely believe we are in the last days of a rapidly fading American empire. There are no more accounting tricks left they can use to cover all the looming debt and "entitlements" and pensions and so on, the real money simply doesn't even come close to existing for this, and what they pay the real producers of tangible goods here is already hovering at bankruptcy levels for those producers, very broadly speaking.
We may still have raw resources, but they will wind up being sold off cheap to cover our national debts, we won't be doing any value added work with them. Similar to some African nation for example, just sell what you have off cheap, wind up with a handful of really wealth people then a buncha peons.
My guess is china will wind up owning everything, they have really the only long range foreign policy of any of the major nations that's worth a flip, and are as protectionist as it gets to boot. It works-and has worked- for them just fine, just no one at high levels of globalist finance in the west says that out loud much, that would spill too many beans for them to easily explain away. We got sold down the river to make billionaires out of millionaires, they sold everyone the fairy tale that credit equals produced wealth equals money in the bank, then decided to fund and expand government based on that fairy tale. It just don't work that way, but it's too late to "not do that".
Just too far gone, man, that's it. I agree that we could be *theoretically* better off than greece, I just disagree that will happen, I think we will get worse, because we will become a serious armed threat to the rest of the planet as the economy implodes further, and eventually, they will take us out just like you'd shoot any mad dog. They will have no choice. Boom. Greece may go broke, but they won't be desperate and turn into some huge threat against other nations, the USA is different in that regard and judging by our track record of lashing out disproportionally..eventually we will get lashed right back in a major way.
That's the progression and timeline I see happening. Steps, in order: Continue with the fai
Given the very next story on Slashdot is about the federal government using college funding to twist colleges' arms into acting as copyright cops, and the federal government's long history of using federal highway funds as golden handcuffs, I wonder how long until the ISPs who take this money will be told to bow and scrape before the MAFIAA.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I'm absolutely not joking, BTW. The Gambino mafia made hundreds of millions of dollars off similar "last mile" scams. The idea is to buy some rural phone company in East Padinkus, then get Fed money for all of the "broadband" it's been putting out.