They have a saying in politics to the effect that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." This is a pretty good illustration. We have the opportunity to improve connectivity in rural America through the wise expenditure of taxpayer funding, and it's best not to squander it by insisting on top-shelf fiber or nothing at all. Let's push the fiber a little deeper, and bridge the last 20,000 feet with something that won't be too expensive to replace in 3-5 years. The budget ($7B) just isn't there to give every barn some nice GigE fiber, even though it would make the cows happy.
Richard Bennett -----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [mailto:jab...@hopcount.ca] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 1:42 PM To: Fred Baker Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband On 26-Aug-2009, at 13:38, Fred Baker wrote: > If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband > implies fiber to the home. I'm sure I remember hearing from someone that the timelines for disbursement of stimulus money were tight enough that many people expected much of the money to remain unspent. Does narrowing the scope of the funding to mandate fibre have the effect of funding more and better infrastructure, or will it simply result in less money being made available? Does it matter?
