Deployment advocate BroadbandNow said Congress squandered a chance to cut the cost of broadband buildouts by 90%, and offers some reasons why legislators have seemed not to dig "dig once" bills, at least enough to pass them.
That came in a newly released research report
Citing a 2012 Goldman Sachs estimate of $140 billion to build out broadband to the entire country, BroadbandNow says its research shows that adopting the dig once policy--long championed by Democratic senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar and even longer by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.)-could have cut that figure to $14 billion.
Dig once is the policy of coordinating highway and road projects with laying fiber conduit. After it failed to pass yet again as part of an appropriations bill, Eshoo this spring reintroduced the Broadband Conduit Deployment Act in the House, a bill that has been kicking around--and she has proposed--in some form for a decade.
Seems like making sure when highways are dug, conduit for broadband pipes for the info "super highway" should be a no-brainer.
BroadbandNow posits a couple of reasons. It points out that road construction projects have a history of being expensive and complicated, so adding another mandate creates even more overhead that some public works departments may oppose it despite the obvious long-term benefits for the added overhead.
The other could be telecom lobbyists working against the deal. But why would they be lobbying against saving money on the buildout? "Not all of these companies are keen to allow their local competitors to gain easy access to robust fiber connections in their most heavily-entrenched [no pun intended] markets," says Tyler Cooper, author of the report, Dig Once: The Digital Divide Solution Congress Squandered And Policy That Could Save $126 Billion On Broadband Deployment.
