The Broadband Stimulus package in the USA gets everybody excited and debating how to spend the sizable but relatively limited amount of money.
One of the big debates is to either allocate it all to bring some form of broadband to underserved rural area’s, or alternatively to experiment with many different projects and approaches in cities and rural areas.
Yesterday I learned a fact that puts “underserved” in a different perspective.
In some cities, like Cleveland (Ohio), more than 50 % of the population cannot get broadband even if they would want it. The landlines are there, but the rest of the infrastructure has not been put in place for DSL to be supported. The reason: apparently these are lower income areas where people switched to a mobile phone (if you have a limited income and have to choose, a mobile phone gets you better economic position than a landline). (Update). This has led to a decision by the phone company not to invest at all in DSL support.
