Chapter 2: Factors bringing about and prolonging America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
-- Winston Churchill
Factors leading to the crisis
For more than a generation, American telecommunications policy has been focused on the wrong thing: bandwidth (broadband) instead of building fiber infrastructure to replace copper telephone lines that reach nearly every doorstep. Consequently, the United States wasted a quarter century in failing to adopt policies to support an aggressive and timely revamp of its telecommunications infrastructure from metallic cable to support legacy telephone and cable television services to fiber to the premise (FTTP) infrastructure to support Internet protocol services.
The country is also misconceiving advanced telecommunications infrastructure myopically, viewing it as a community level challenge when in fact it's a national one since it occurs all across the nation. Modern digital telecommunications infrastructure is fundamentally interstate, connecting states to each other and the nation to the rest of the world via the Internet. Unless it quickly changes course, the United States is likely to spend the coming years responding to these failures with incremental, local fiddling at the edges leading to more failure and disappointment.
Too many Americans remain embarrassingly served by 1990s DSL over aging copper lines, satellite Internet and even dialup. Most homes lack fiber connections and there's no coordinated national effort to modernize America's aging and outdated legacy metallic telecom infrastructure to fiber.
A national crisis
America’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure gaps are not an inherently local problem. They occur all over the United States – in urban, suburban, exurban and rural areas. It is a nationwide issue requiring a national solution. A major impediment to addressing this issue from a national or regional perspective is telecommunications is typically conceived of as a local service offering rather than infrastructure that links localities to other localities, regions and states and nations – the way long distance telephone service did for decades. The root of this conceptualization has both old and new origins.
The old one is cable TV service.
