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gary beach's Blog
America woefully behind in broadband deployment. Recent FCC report claims 32 million "high speed" lines now deployed to homes and small business. But what FCC defines as high speed (more than 200kbps) pales compared to high speed in Japan (40MBPS) and Korea (200MBPS by 2010). Broadband deployment not about laying the fiber, cable etc. All about securing our country's future economic success.
Just like the interstate highway system was in the 1950s. In 1956 Congress created the Highway Trust Fund to build out, maintain and upgrade the interstate highway system. To this day, 20+ cents on every gallon of gasoline purchased, goes to HTF.
The United States faces a double whammy of a broadband challenge. First, as mentioned prior, we are behind six other nations in broadband deployment. What I fear is a more daunting challenge is our "high speed" broadband connections look like breakdown lanes on other countries broadband networks.
To fund the buildout, maintenance and upgrade of the national broadband internet infrastructure I propose the creation of the Broadband Trust Fund. The BTF would be funded with the surcharge of one half of one percent on purchase of every tech product/service in America. Not particularly onerous. A family buying a new $1500.00 pc would pay $7.50.
Businesses would pay more but above the $100K pay-in every dollar paid into the BTF is written off as a tax credit.
With nearly $500B of tech stuff sold in US, this idea could raise $2.5 billion annually.
Money would be dispersed to states to 1)offer low cost $1000 loans to homes and small businesses to upgrade to broadband, 2)offer at competitive bid the buildout and maintenance of the state's broadband infrastructure.
Comments? Send along to Gary Beach at gbeach@cio.com....or call 508 935 4202 |
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December 28th, 2004 @ 1:52PM |
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