Can He Get Me Cinemax First?
So Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias are both noting that the president's proposal to have universal broadband access by 2007 is unlikely to hit that deadline.
I've been steadily less of a techie since I took down my old dial-up BBS when I was 14, so I'll just take their word on that one. But this sure sounds redundant. Cable TV, f'rinstance, is pretty widely available, with about 2/3 of U.S. households hooked up—and presumably the majority of those who don't have it just not particularly interested. Internet penetration (dialup and broadband) recently surpassed cable penetration, and has kept growing, to the point where about 3/4 of us are online [PDF]. Fairly impressive when you consider that it's been a mass medium for much less time. A little over 45 percent of the online households apparently have broadband.
My impression, and maybe this is wrong, is that you can already mostly get cable or DSL broadband in cities and suburbs (or will be able to pretty soon) for about the same price as a basic cable package. If you live out in the sticks, there's satellite access at pretty competitive rates. Do we really need some kind of national strategy to accomplish what the market seems to be doing reasonably well as it stands?
Update: Jim Henley reminds me that we both recently met the EFF's Tim Pozar, whose Bay Area Research Wireless Network is a grassroots attempt to solve the "last mile" problem. Also, while a commenter mentions the persistent problem with wired-access outside urban areas, it seems to me that the possibility of satellite picking up the slack is already here, not some vague possiblity—these guys at least claim that they can deliver high speed to anyone with "a clear line of sight to the southern sky within the continental U.S." It's significantly slower than my cable connection, but even more significantly faster than dialup (and, presumably, likely to get faster). Maybe not ideal, but good enough that it seems hard to justify the cost of running fiber to every freakin' farmhouse in the country.