[1st-mile-nm] broadband economics

[Steve Ross]

Thanks. When Sarah was doing the thesis she got some stuff from us, and I
saw the orals last summer. This reminds me to get the whole thesis. It was
due to be accessible right about now.

Deliberately, she did not get into community economic impacts. Usf doesn't
actually consider them directly. So it is not an answer to the issue of
rural job loss and population loss stranding rural assets. You help people,
not communities. Subsidies don't work if you have no access. Satellite
access is really an emergency thing, and not cheap.

She was really looking at whether bidders were lowballing estimated costs
to get grants or loans, or highballing to inflate what they applied for.
She didn't find any of that. We noted that the cost estimates had to
roughly conform to the FCC models when it came to grants, and while there
is a separate rural cost series (FCC buys them from Costquest ) it is
necessarily pretty generic. When it comes to RUS loans, the loan officers
are much more precise in their own calculations. Yes, government hands out
grants in a more sloppy way than it hands out loans! Go figure.

She did not want to get into the issue of rural communities just wanting to
survive vs wall street trying to efficiently allocate capital . Wall Street
cannot get into community issues and communities should not be forced to
think about competitive returns when, on average, a quarter to half of all
rural population loss is due to lack of broadband access.

The panel discussion was funny. She's a "here is what we think we know from
the numbers" gal. The other panelists just hate spending any money to help
the poor, or to help increase incomes. The idea that a Tennessee
congresswoman would block rural financial aid for broadband is just evil
and beyond dumb.

-- Steve Ross

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 3:59 PM Doug Orr <doug.orr at gmail.com> wrote:

> I stumbled across this recently: Essays in Broadband Economics was the
> dissertation of Sarah Oh at GMU. I haven't been able to find a link to the
> actual dissertation, but here's the abstract
> <https://economics.gmu.edu/defenses/990>, which looks interesting.
>
> Ms. Oh is now at the Technological Policy Institute and has produced a variety
> of interesting posts <https://techpolicyinstitute.org/author/sarah-oh/>
>
> include this one on rural broadband
> <https://techpolicyinstitute.org/2018/02/12/universal-service-and-rural-broadband-two-think-minimum-podcast/> and
> universal service.
>
> And related is a presentation
> <https://techpolicyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Prince-Wallsten-Bandwidth-v-Latency-101918.pdf>
> on bandwidth and latency, as related to willingness by consumers to pay.
>
> I'm sure you-all know more about this than I do. Hopefully it's
> interesting.
>
>   Doug
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