Remember Bush's Promise of Universal Broadband by 2007? The Staggering Cost of that Failure

In 2004, President Bush made universal broadband "in every corner of America by 2007" an explicit goal of his administration. Well, it's 2007, and millions of Americans are still without broadband access to the Internet. Millions more have access only to low quality "fraudband" that is so slow, unreliable and/or unaffordable that it fails to meet other countries' definitions of broadband, and fails to provide the benefits that President Bush extolled when he established his goal, according to The Case for Universal Broadband in America: Now! a report by the nonprofit Center for Creative Voices in Media released today at the Brookings Institution.

Since 2004, America has actually fallen in the global rankings in per capita use of broadband technology from 10th to 15th. The economic, social and cultural costs of this failure to deploy broadband to all Americans are staggering. Here are a few benefits President Bush cited, and Americans are not yet enjoying, because of this failure:

• Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in New Economic Development

• Over a Million New, High-Paying Jobs

• Increased Homeland Security and Public Safety

• Better Health Care at Lower Cost

• Enhanced Educational Opportunities

• Greater Citizen Participation in Government and Communities

• More Access to - and Participation in - Journalism, Culture and Entertainment

The bottom line is that in 2007, America is not even close to deploying fast, reliable and affordable broadband to all its citizens. Our federal government must undertake a concerted national effort to deploy universal, net-neutral broadband comparable to that which deployed telephone and electric service and built a vast network of superhighways. The economic, social and cultural benefits to all Americans of this investment will vastly outweigh its costs. Our nation will stop falling farther behind our international competitors, secure our leadership in global technology, enhance our homeland security and public safety, and provide all of our citizens with the opportunity to participate in the new, global, networked 21st Century world.

Please take a look at The Case for Universal Broadband in America: Now! This is one time the President got it right. It's time to make fast, reliable, affordable and open broadband access to the Internet a reality for all Americans.

Comments

[SamThornton]

Funny thing, the major carriers have received several billion in subsidies/tax breaks since the 1980s to provide universal broadband service. Wonder what happened to that?

[realitytrumpsbull]

I read about a year and a half ago that there
was a counter-trend of people getting back
off the internet, due to all the ID theft,
viruses, spam, and so forth. Th'innirnit isn't
'all that', and now that the cable company
wants to basically make it another TV channel
and tie up the bandwidth with crap like movies on demand etc., newspapers are starting to look
better and better...

[dadw5boys]

BUSH TRADED AWAY THE BROADBAND FOR SPYING ASSISTANCE FROM THE TELECOMS.

[Balzac]

You've probably hit the nail right on the head.

[Destin]

Fraudband is right. Especially when Europe gets their broadband, on average, half the price that Americans get it. What's more, they get insane speeds. 24mb/s is comparable in price to the 1.5mb/s i got right now.

Then you got the LIES that the corporate hacks, flacks and shills spread like wildfire here in the USA.

For example, #1 thing the phoneco will tell you when ordering DSL service is.... you can't get just dsl, that it won't work without a dialtone. That's an outright lie and I'm living proof of it as my phone was shut off weeks ago, no dialtone but the DSL keeps right on ticking. ;)

Also the cable company was doing the same crap. Saying that you had to have digital tv service with the digital set top box in order to get cable modem service. So they frost your nuts by making you pay for extra crap you probably don't want or need.

And here it was about 8 or 9 years ago that I first got broadband, went to both the phoneco and cableco. Cheapest I could get DSL was $68 a month and cable was $88 a month. Neither would allow you to get ONLY the internet service. ;)

Here's why, cause you could just get skype, vonage or some other internet based phone system for less than half the price of the cheapest phoneco plan. ;)

As it is right now, cheapest I can get either for right now, is approximately $100 for either one. Price keeps going up, and whereas in the old days you could minimize plans to save overall money, they stopped doing that too. Today, if you go with just dialtone, they won't give you the advertised price for DSL. They say the advertised price is with one of the plans. So they got you coming and going and bent over the table and don't even bother to use vaseline. And forget the cable company, they are just as bad.

[Jey]

Destin...help me! I do not how to get DSL. My lovely phone co. SBC says it's not available in my area and won't spend the money on getting it to me. They told me to contact AT&T, my cell phone provider to see if I could get it that way. I can but I can only download 5MB of information. Not going to help when downloading movies or audio. There's also Wild Blue. What are your thoughts? You seem to know quite a bit and that is why I'm asking. Stuck here in dial-up world at a whopping 30.6 Kbps. Take 15 hours to download 45MB audio.

[Destin]

I have no idea really, lol. The corporations are gonna be stubborn. But chances are, if you can get 56k, you can get dsl. ;) After all, it's a phone company thing. There are farms and rural areas here in Georgia that have dsl, so I know it can be done. ;)

Take where I live as an example. I live in the oldest area of town. Yet I can get even the newest "DSL-2" here. But a few months ago, I had been living in an apartment in a newer area of town, in a commercial district right next to one of the malls and medstops. Was told I was "further away" from a switching station, so I could only get plain DSL. Course, that was probably payback from a year before when I caught them overcharging me for DSL for 7 months, claiming I had to "sign up" for the new rate. Hmmm, I was already signed up. Went to BBB and PSC and I got my refund. ;)

Anyways, don't let the companies BS you about stuff. I've been through it all it seems, lol. If they give you any lip, or give you fishy answers, go right to the Better Business Bureau, Public Service Commission and Federal Trade Commission. Make them do their jobs. Otherwise you'll have to do their job and you won't be getting paid for it.

[jimmyaj]

Like, deploying the electric grid and the phone network? Like building the interstate highway system? Think again. Those things couldn't be done today, not with the modern-day neo-con GOP in charge, not with a government that denies the concept of "The Public Good". Too many years of Republican plundering and lies have sapped this nation of its soul.

[jsarets]

Neoconservative Pocket Guide to Political Terms

Public Interest, n: A fantasy dreamed up by liberal socialists where the public sometimes acts like a single consumer instead of like a bunch of individual consumers. As we know, corporations are the only groups that act as individuals. See "Supply-side Economics".

[AngieD]

Get over it! You live in the most politically corrupt of all the so-called 'First Division Nations'. The infrastructure is crumbling, people are dying from lack of health insurance and the only area of world class expertise left is the design, development, deployment and sale of ever more deadly weapons systems to be used against small, poorly armed countries who have never offered a threat to you - oh, and the privatization of war to 'Murder for Hire' companies like Blackwater. While the rest of the world prepares for global warming and the slow decline of oil, you'll just sit there while corporation rob you blind and the Fed steals your home. How can the country that once was a beacon of light to the world have sunk so low?

[patriotscholar]

No surprises here. It was a campaign promise, meant nothing.

[noamjunior]

not from a GOper

[JacktheBlogger]

This has been a presidency of unfunded promises. But then when you spend over a half trillion dollars on a war that has not gone according to plan, most of your other promises are going to be hard to keep.

If President Bush can veto funding for SCHIP and Stem Cell Research, I would imagine universal broadband remaining just a pipe dream - pardon the pun! Don't forget he also wanted us to go back to the moon and land on Mars - dream on!

Bush 41 was said to have not been good at the "vision thing." I suspect the same is true of Bush 43. These grandiose dreams - like father, like son - will fade away by the end of his second term.

[ZingoBonMot]

Fraudband. That pretty well describes what my local phone company wanted to charge me $50 a month for.
S-l-o-w? Yep.
Se rv ice in ter rup tio ns? Yep.
Bush failed us. What's new?

[stavros]

Yep.

[jacklambert]

If you bought into Bush lies.....Lying is OK!