Addressing Rural Broadband Is Complicated, AEI's Swanson Says
Questions remain about the best strategy for bringing broadband to rural America and whether subsidies are the answer, American Enterprise Institute scholar Bret Swanson blogged Thursday. “Federal and state programs designed to subsidize rural broadband deployment have done some good…
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over the past 20 years,” he wrote. “And the US, contrary to much conventional wisdom, actually leads the world in most broadband categories. Yet the dilemma remains: Just how much money should we spend and in what format, or what other incentives can we design, to most effectively extend access to the last few percentage of the population?” For decades, the U.S. population has been shifting to urban areas where broadband is nearly ubiquitous, Swanson said. “What’s the right way to think about serving a shrinking proportion of Americans in high-cost geographies?”