Rural Electrification and Rural Broadband December 31, 2006
Posted by Tim Schneider in Rural Electrification, Universal Service.trackback
My original plan for the semester ahead was to take Telecommunications Law up at Columbia and finagle a directed research project for this semester with an NYU professor to think about the Universal Service Fund. This plan has fallen by the wayside since I can’t cross register for that class after all, and I can’t seem to find anyone on the NYU faculty whose area of research would fit what I want to study. I’m going to try, sure, but I think it’s unlikely. I’m probably going to have to write this paper on my own time. Nice.
I’m hoping to use this blog as a place to organize my thinking about rural broadband generally and the Universal Service Fund in particular. The Universal Service Fund is a profound failure, but I’m not willing to give up on government intervention just yet. You see, there’s this little thing called the Rural Electrification Administration. Quoting from this article:
The R.E.A. is considered one of the most immediate and profound successes in the history of federal policy-making for the national economy.
Rural electrification actually accomplished what it set out to do and much more, providing electrical service which was both a prerequisite and a catalyst for subsequent innovation and economic growth. The similarities to today’s rural broadband problems are obvious:
While urban households and businesses gained electricity in large numbers after 1910, the more sparsely populated rural regions of the United States were generally without electricity and were denied the commercial progress it brought. Electrical service providers ignored the rural market due to its high network construction costs and the prospect of meager immediate profits. From the supplier standpoint, rural homes, farms and businesses were stretched too far apart and offered too little demand relative to the cost of investment.
This is not a sexy topic. It looks to me like writing on USF is a sure way to condemn yourself to the academic wilderness, and no one writes on rural electrification. At least one person has already tried to make this comparison, with little apparent impact on the policy debate. And I may abandon the paper, as I expect I’ll abandon this blog as the semester picks up. But until then, here goes.
[...] realized this and took REA loans or ran rural lines on their own. And as we know, the REA was wildly successful in electrifying rural [...]
[...] this fall I was feeling overwhelmed with all the work I had to do, between a paper on Universal Service, a Timposium, and starting at a new law school. The appropriate thing to do was to . . . [...]