To Have Or To Have Not

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), dba the economic stimulus bill, contains $7.2 billion to start closing the gap between the broadband haves and the have-nots in the U.S..  In a country as rich and advanced as ours, you have to wonder how we created this “digital divide” in the first place.

First, a little background.

Packets are the essence of modern telecommunications.  Almost all information that traverses the network is, for at least part of its journey, in the form of electronic envelopes filled with bits:  packets.  Information is translated from its native form into packets at its source and translated back into its native form:  voice, data, or video, by the recipient.  Packets can be mixed in ingenious ways  to simultaneously send and receive multiple forms of information using the same equipment and on the same transport links.  That’s called “multi-media”.

Once we started pitching and catching multi-media packets across the network, we realized how important it is to be able to send and receive lots of packets.  If you can do that, you can make a telephone call, browse the Internet and watch TV all at the same time!  You can watch high-definition TV.  You can download movies and music.  You can send pictures to your friends, or your enemies.  You can write magazine articles from your home office.  That’s called “broadband”.

It’s getting to the point where a multi-media, broadband connection is a necessity of modern life.  If you have one, you can live and work in the modern world to the fullest extent.  If you have not, you are left behind, stranded in the 20th century.

The big telcos figured this out somewhere around 2002 or 2003.  They had spent the last half of the ‘90s contesting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the courts, running CLECs out of business and watching cable companies install millions of cable modems to take a substantial lead in broadband connections.  About 2000, the telcos got serious about DSL technology, which they had invented in the early ‘90s and allowed to lanquish for most of a decade.  They soon learned that DSLs wouldn’t reach far enough or go fast enough to compete with cable.  A DSL just doesn’t deliver enough packets for multimedia services to customers more than a mile or two away from central offices, amounting to about half a typical telco’s customers.