US Approves a whopping $6 Billion Broadband Plan

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday approved a $6 billion broadband plan that would provide grants to shore up the country’s broadband infrastructure. This is part of the $825 billion economic stimulus package.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) would have two years to develop a map of broadband availability throughout the United States and post that data on a publicly available Web site. Obama team, which is pro-internet, strongly believes this generate more online economic activity.

NTIA would also be able to hand out grants to those willing to build out broadband service, wireless voice service, and advanced wireless broadband service.

• the term ‘‘basic broadband service’’ means  a service delivering data to the end user transmitted at a speed of at least 5 megabits per second downstream and at least 1 megabit per second upstream;
• the term ‘‘advanced broadband service’’means a service delivering data to the end user transmitted at a speed of at least 45 megabits per second downstream and at least 15 megabits per second upstream;
• the term ‘‘advanced wireless broadband service’’ means a wireless service delivering to the end user data transmitted at a speed of at least 3 megabits per second downstream and at least 1 megabit per second upstream over an end-to-end internet protocol wireless network;

India cannot expect this kind of support from the government. We need to realize the problems and priorities in India are very different when compared to the Western world. But it would help if govt could do something to bring down the rates of internet access in India (it has come down considerably, but ye dil maange more)

Govt owned telco, BSNL has aggressive broadband plans for rural India. In urban India private players like Airtel would have done far better in terms of broadband peneteration if the govt had not interefered. For e.g. I know many localities/areas in Bangalore which don’t have Airtel broadband because govt has not given permission for “digging” the roads. I thought digging roads was our birth right!