Study: Universal Broadband Will Cost $230 Billion, Way More Than The U.S. Is Investing

We've long noted how entrenched broadband providers have historically refused to upgrade areas that don't deliver immediate, favorable returns (quite often poor, minority, and low income neighborhoods). That, combined with a monopoly assault on competition and regulatory oversight in most markets, has left the U.S. with patchy, substandard broadband networks we're still struggling to track the full impact of.

On the plus side, the U.S. government is currently in the process of investing more than $60 billion in broadband thanks to American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). And while that's going to be an historic investment, it's still not enough to get the job done, according to a new report.

A report by fixed wireless equipment provider Tarana Wireless claims the full cost to the federal government to bring fiber broadband to every U.S. household that NTIA considers unserved" or underserved" would be approximately $230 billion:

Tarana estimated fiber deployment costs based on an analysis of 132 fiber broadband deployments that received funding through state-level programs in five states - Alabama, California, Michigan, Nebraska and Virginia. The goal was to select a group of states that would be representative of deployment costs nationwide.

There's a narrative stumbling around the telecom policy space that between ARPA and the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding included in the infrastructure bill, that we've got this whole digital divide" thing pretty much whipped. But Tarana (which is trying to position itself to receive subsidies for fixed wireless) insists that's simply not the case.

A hard number has traditionally been difficult to pin down, given our sloppy failures at broadband mapping, and the complications of estimating the final combination of taxpayer subsidies and other, often long-term investments in last mile and middle mile" networks.

How we invest the billions we do have remains the more pressing issue.

The lion's share of this new broadband funding is already being hoovered up by the same telecom monopolies largely responsible for the nation's broadband gaps, via their relentless attacks on smaller competitors. Unsurprisingly, those industry giants have been working overtime to redirect this historic round of funding into their pockets, and away from smaller, local businesses, cooperatives, utilities, or municipal broadband builds.

U.S. policymakers generally aren't willing to stand up to powerful, entrenched telecom monopolies tethered to our first responder and intelligence gathering systems (most can't even acknowledge monopolization is a problem). So what we get is a kind of policy theater, in which policymakers throw billions of dollars at a problem but refuse to address the real, underlying cause of dysfunction.

In the U.S. (and in much of the world), that cause is telecom giants who've monopolized the market and captured all federal and local regulators, ensuring their geographical fiefdoms never see meaningful competition. That, in turn, results in high prices, slow speeds, patchy availability, and terrible customer service; issues we generally only pay lip service toward.

So while the huge infusion of funding from ARPA and the IIJA are most certainly going to help, the impact's going to be muted if the lion's share of an already insufficient funding amount is thrown at the monopolies most responsible for the sector's biggest issues. Investing a large chunk of this funding instead into open access, community-owned fiber networks would also help dramatically, but that's generally been a message captured U.S. policymakers don't want to hear.