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NGN Magazine Magazine logo
July 2010 | Volume 2/Number 4
Editor's Note

The Broadband Stimulus – Where Are We Now?

By Paula Bernier

It's been about two months since the last of the first round stimulus awards were announced. The NTIA as part of BTOP will distribute $1.2 billion in federal funding among 82 grants. I didn't do the math on the RUS awards, but you can see the summaries for that agency's BIP awards at www.broadbandusa.gov.

So, where are we now?

The answer at press time in early June was that while round-one award winners have been named, the actual money had yet to be distributed. That's because NTIA and RUS were (and likely now are still) working with awardees to dot the i's and cross the t's on the documents required to process the funds.




But the process is moving things forward. And, wisely, many of the winning applicants simultaneously have been selecting equipment suppliers, seeking loans for their matching funds, hiring folks and otherwise getting ready to ensure they can get the broadband ball rolling as soon as possible. For example, TEC, the holding company for several telecom service providers in the Southeast, recently announced its selection of ADTRAN (News - Alert) gear for its broadband stimulus upgrade project at Bay Springs Telephone Co. TEC received a RUS award in the first round to upgrade its transport network and push fiber deeper into the Bay Springs Network for enhanced broadband delivery.

Meanwhile, some other first round award winners have applied for bank loans and added staff in efforts to keep things moving forward. That is expected to be especially important for awardees that are building broadband networks that involve digs and will be located in parts of the country in which the earth freezes during the fall and winter months. However, while the federal government has not been particularly quick in its dispersal of the broadband stimulus funds, the good news is that we can soon expect to see a real impact in terms of spending and broadband expansion given these monies are likely to be released very shortly – possibly even before this issue makes it to print and onto the TMCnet Web site. Another bit of uplifting news is that while we've all been waiting for the broadband stimulus to make Internet access more widely available and high-quality in rural and other markets, broadband penetration has continued to climb.

According to digital measurement firm comScore (News - Alert), broadband penetration in rural markets has seen double-digit growth in the past year as regional providers capture an increasing share of the market in these areas.

Leichtman Research Group Inc. says the 19 largest U.S. cablecos and telcos, which represent about 93 percent of the market, added more than 1.4 million high-speed Internet subscribers in the first quarter of 2010. That means there are 73 million subscribers between them – with cable companies having 40.2 million broadband customers and telcos having nearly 32.9 million subscribers. But for all the talk about the need for more, and higher-speed, broadband, it's interesting to note that most folks haven't a clue as to what speeds they're actually getting from their providers.

Indeed, the Federal Communications Commission last month released the results of a survey on the consumer broadband experience, which found that 80 percent of U.S. broadband users don't have a handle on the speed of their broadband connections. To help consumers understand the speeds they're getting, the FCC (News - Alert) is asking for 10,000 volunteers in the U.S. to be part of a study to measure home broadband speeds. The selected participants of the effort, which the FCC is doing in partnership with SamKnows Ltd., will get special hardware in their homes that will measure the performance of their broadband connections. But whether or not people know the specifics of their broadband performance is less important, in my opinion, than how they perceive the experience.

The customer's experience, of course, hinges on not only the speed of the access connection, but also the latency (which can be impacted by a wide variety of factors from the end user to the network backbone), the application performance and the cost.

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