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The Broadband Stimulus Chill

By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor

As final rules for "broadband stimulus" programs are hopefully announced today, it is possible that broadband deployments already planned, but essentially on hold until the final rules became known, might start again. The reason is not so much that any of the stimulus money will be spent this year: that seems quite unlikely.

 

Instead, companies that have naturally been holding back to see whether the program is beneficial (some providers think the strings attached are onerous enough to discourage participation). Since there is a minimum 20 percent matching requirement to get funding, a wise executive would have made sure that funds needed for the match remained available.

 

Even executives essentially doubtful about whether they want to participate would have been well served to wait for announcement of final rules, just to make sure, before executing on already planned investments.

 

As often happens, the intent of the program, which is to deploy more broadband, has lead, in the short term, to less deployment of broadband. Good intentions; unexpected results.

Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tim Gray