Broadband Stimulus Has Failed To Date

Let's stop kidding ourselves: to date, the broadband stimulus has failed.

The original purpose of the stimulus was to get money flowing quickly to create jobs. We're now more than eight months in and no money's gone out. So the stimulus has failed to get money flowing quickly.

The stimulus has also failed when it comes to creating jobs. Not only has no money gone out to help create these jobs, but it seems like no one's even seriously talking about the broadband stimulus in terms of creating jobs any more.

Instead, most of the discussions center around fixing America's broadband shortcomings, but on that front the stimulus has failed too as people are waking up to the fact that $7 billion isn't near enough to solve all our broadband problems.

So that's the big picture of how the stimulus as a whole is failing: it's not working quickly enough, it's not creating jobs, and it's not up to the task of fixing all our broadband woes. But it's important to note that the process itself also seems to have failed.

First it took months for the rules to come out, which might have been OK if it weren't for the fact that the rules were so underwhelming. Not only did they lack vision but they were largely divorced from the realities of how networks are built, forcing projects to slice and dice service areas to meet definitions creating inefficiencies, requiring technologies be chosen today that may or may not be available to purchase once the money arrives, and setting timelines for how fast the money must be spent that may be impossible to live up to. The list goes on and on.

Then once the rules were out, applicants only had a month to get their applications in, which required a herculean effort given all the information that was required to fill out the applications.

Then we sat around for a month basically hearing nothing.

During this time people were applying to be volunteer reviewers, but there seemed to be little serious effort being made to vet the reviewers for competency and bias. And we still don't know if any of these volunteers are actually being used to review anything.

Which brings up another clear failure: the breakdown of the review process. The fact that there was no initial weaning out of bad applications before they were sent to the states is more than a little troubling. It meant that states that were already ill-prepared to properly review these applications had to wade through more than should have been necessary. As a result, most states recommended a larger number of projects than they would've if that initial culling had happened, which will likely dilute their recommendations.

Now we're all left in the position of waiting again, unsure of what all the states had to say, with no idea as to what influence those recommendations will have, and without any real sense for what's coming next and how much longer we have to wait until we start seeing real progress.

And then to top it all off, we're likely soon going to be asked to give feedback on a how to improve this process for the next round before we even get a chance to see the results of the first round to know whether or not this seemingly slapdash process worked!

With all this being said, I do want to say that I don't necessarily blame the good people at NTIA and RUS for these failures. NTIA has never given away this much money before and quite simply didn't have the staff initially to handle this task, and RUS has never been known for its ability to get money out the door quickly. It's also insane to think that the stimulus was passed, money appropriated, and rules started being discussed months before the heads of NTIA and RUS were confirmed.

So, as many have said, in many ways this process was doomed for failure before it began. And it's hard not to label what's happened so far a failure no matter how you look at it.

And yet, I still have hope that this process can be saved. Where we currently stand is that the entire weight of this process now falls on the shoulders of two men: Adelstein and Strickling, the respective heads of RUS and NTIA.

If they can parse through whatever insight has been gathered through whatever vetting process the applications have endured and make the right decisions to invest taxpayer dollars in real projects that can deliver real results we can learn from, then they have the potential to save the stimulus from being a colossal failure.

They can then also seize the opportunity to learn from their mistakes in the first round and come back with a second round that makes more sense, that doesn't get so caught up in the urgency of doing something that it loses sight of doing the right thing.

Despite the doomsday title of this post, I do still believe that things can right themselves in the end, especially as everything I've heard about Adelstein and Strickling is that they're the right people to tackle these challenges.

But that being said, until we start getting some signs that positive progress is being made, we can't afford to beat around the bush any more about what's happened so far with the stimulus. We can't sit back and assume that everything's going to be all right when all signs point to the fact that they're not.

That's why I'm writing this post today. To throw down the gauntlet to Adelstein and Strickling: so far the broadband stimulus has been a failure. The pressure's now on you guys to make sure it doesn't stay that way.