The prospects for broadband deployment in rural America

A great deal of policy attention over the past two years has been directed at insuring that more communities within the country have access to high speed or broadband connections. The 1996 Telecommunications Act promises through its universal service provisions that telecommunications services will be roughly comparable across urban and rural areas, but the rapid development of new Internet-based services and the networks on which they depend illustrates huge discrepancies in broadband availability. This paper analyzes some of the programs and policies that claim to Address this network divide, using existing data to comment on their efficacy. These analyses suggest that the prospects for near-term broadband services in rural region are dim, and that the existing policy approaches appear insufficient to achieve the goal of widespread rural deployment. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.