According to this blog entry at Forbes.com, among the many projects of the 2009 economic stimulus was a healthy expenditure to bring broadband internet to areas that didn't have it. The blog reports on a paper written by economists Jeffrey Eisenach and Kevin Caves, which is abstracted here.
One of the things that stood out is that the Rural Utilities Service, the federal agency that was overseeing the broadband extensions, brought broadband internet access into some areas that hadn't has broadband internet access since...wait, some of the people already had it? Really? Oops, our bad. Well, there were still a significant portion of people in those areas who lacked any kind of broadband...what, 3G was already there? OK, that may bump the total a little, but still there has to have been a significant number of households without it...seven?
Really? The RUS project in southwestern Montana, one of the three that Eisenach and Caves studied, addressed the complete lack of broadband access to seven homes? At a cost of about seven million dollars apiece? I would have happily taken an alternative to our local communications co-op for about ten grand, or less than one one-thousandth of that cost, but nobody from the RUS was knockin' on my door.
Too bad -- I'd have been happy to help.
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