[1st-mile-nm] broadband economics

[Doug Orr]

Very interesting and very cool insight. Thanks for sharing that.

Mercatus seems to be libertarian leaning (Koch funded and the awesome Tyler
Cowen was on her committee), so not surprising they're not oriented towards
organizing public resources. Overall the rural stuff just seems to be
something there has to be public mandate and funding if it's going to
work...

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 4:45 PM Steve Ross <editorsteve at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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