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The Vermont/Sovernet project is blowing up because they're ignoring the open access requirements of their funding and suggesting the schools need to agree to spend $120K+ with Sovernet, including ISP service.  The obvious move is to require Sovernet to immediately post the project map and the terms of access, neither of which the schools, Fairpoint, or I have been able to determine. Three Ring Binder in Maine has done just that and carriers are signing up. My guess is that honoring rules will bring in competition and save Maine schools $millions.  It's stupid for Sovernet to fight this because even with competition they will almost surely win most of the contracts.  Small school districts will almost certainly choose a single provider and the company with the local network will usually win. 

   Researching the Vermont story, I discovered NTIA projects around the country are way behind schedule. See "No Facilities Constructed To Date" for some examples. If I had time and NTIA didn't bury their data, I would find many more. John Bryson, the new Commerce Secretary, should make cleaning up the mess a high priority. While Bryson might be expected to bring in his own team, NTIA Director Larry Strickling is a great guy, an effective politician and played an important role in the Obama campaign. He can almost certainly keep his job if he wants to. But Bryson can and should demand from results from Larry. 

    Step one should be a list of projects behind schedule. Step two should be making clear to everyone that if they don't meet the deadline their funds will be cut off but they will be required to finish anyway. Step three would be plans to get on track. With the threat of losing funds, those plans might well be realistic. Since the plans were required to be "shovel-ready," there's no reason they should need more than three years to finish. 

    Where the grantee isn't confident they can actually deliver, time to cancel the project now and cut everyone's losses. In 2011, with massive budgets cuts closing soup kitchens and even schools, upgrading broadband where service is already available isn't the best use of public funds. 

     Bryson can also require openness and honesty, as promised by Obama's campaign. I've three times asked Larry "about how many jobs are you creating and about how many unserved will be reached?" and never received a responsive answer. He's spending $5B with those as the primary goals, so I refuse to believe he doesn't have a good estimate. Nor should getting ordinary press information require an expensive freedom of information filing and take so long the news is stale.

     The biggest problem was that Washington wildly overestimated how many were actually unserved and designed a program that failed when put into practice. Confused by his own campaign rhetoric, Julius Genachowski thought 20% of the U.S. couldn't get broadband. (Washington Post) That's about four times the actual figure.  The stimulus program was written to service towns and small cities without broadband by attracting proposals for new networks. By the summer, it was obvious there were almost no unserved cities or towns large enough to support a proposal. The actual number of "unserved" according to the first national broadband map was 2-4%.

    Most unserved are scattered in clusters of several dozen homes or fewer. The minimum economic size of a broadband network is several hundred customers and probably higher most places. Isolated homes, even a few dozen, can only be economically reached by the existing local telco and possibly cableco who already has facilities and backhaul. 

    In addition, the figures from NTIA on jobs created are essentially fraudulent. They arbitrarily claim "for every $M spent on broadband, xxx jobs will be directly created." That meant that a project that created essentially no jobs counted as creating as many jobs as one that actually put people to work. Half of the North Georgia grant, for example, apparently paid for the use of existing dark fiber.  That does not create any jobs. 

     They claim the North Georgia project will create 837 direct jobs and a totally unbelievable 21,000 indirect jobs over the construction period. My best guess, based on the number of fiber miles actually being built, was 30-60 jobs for two years. I reported that project to the NTIA Inspector General for this and other anomalous statements. As far as I know, nothing's been done although based on the public information on the project it stinks. 

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"Governments always lie," I.F. Stone taught two generations of journalists. He was exaggerating, and I expected much better from the Obama people, many of whom are friends. Incoming Commerce Secretary Bryson should insist on a higher standard of accuracy for his department. Bryson was Chairman of the Public Policy Institute of California, where Jed Kolko's careful broadband study concluded "The economic benefits to residents appear to be limited." Does Broadband Boost Local Economic Development?.  That corresponds to the recent OECD conclusion "The Economic Evidence is Uncertain." I, like all the authors of these studies, are strong broadband advocates. But there's no big economic payoff these days in the data. 70% of families across the developed world are connected, including nearly all those interested who aren't poor.  Connecting the poor is a good thing. Speeding up everyone's connection also has social benefits, if only by providing more choice in TV. Jennie's loving the direct downloads of BBC and even Australian programming. But things like telemedicine and distance learning are fine with the connections most of us already have.  There's approximately zero evidence speeding things up makes a big difference. 

     NTIA has made claims for extraordinary economic benefits for broadband, totally unsupportable.  Larry probably thinks this is innocent puffery, but I'm watching inflated claims for broadband used to justify enormous waste. Bryson should clean this up.