A Realistic Estimate for Building a 100Mbps Nation

One of the challenges advocates of a 100Mbps Nation have faced has been the lack of an accurate estimate for what it will cost to achieve our goal. The FCC suggested that achieving a universal 100Mbps Nation would cost $350 billion, but some recent calculations by Dave Russell of Calix have shown that we can achieve a Full Fiber Nation, which should be able to enable a 1Gbps Nation and beyond, for less than that.

Before getting into his specific numbers, though, I want to point out something that he did that I think makes a lot of sense and helps frame this discussion in a more realistic way.

While I often talk about the goal of a fiber pipe to every last home, that will probably never happen. There are some homes that are so remote that there will likely never be a business case to justify the investment required to serve them with fiber. And too often debates around universal service get bogged down in the extra high cost of serving the extremely remote. So he cut them out of the estimate, which has a profound effect on it.

He highlights how areas with less than one home per square mile represent 27% of America's landmass, and areas with one to five homes per square mile cover another 23%. If an area has less than five homes per square mile, they're probably not going to be able to support a fiber network.

If you combine these two together you end up taking 50% of America's area off the table from having to worry about wiring with fiber to the home. Yet that combined area only contains 2% of America's population.

While I'd love to see every last American have the benefits of fiber available, 2% is a number I can live with if it means that 98% of America can use it.

And the other benefit of doing this is that you've now doubled the overall density of the rest of America, which puts us more on par with other nations whose higher density has often been credited as giving them an advantage over the challenges America faces in getting itself wired.

Dave then uses cost estimates for deploying fiber to different types of communities from Verizon, Hiawatha Broadband, and Jaguar Communications to come up with an overall estimate of $206 billion to bring fiber to 98% of Americans.

That's still obviously a massive number, which doesn't include the cost of a wireless cloud or of getting that last 2% of the population connected, but it gives us something more specific and solid to work with.

The key now, though, is to make sure that we don't allow Congress and the public to get sticker shock at these estimates. We can't allow people to dismiss the possibility of a Full Fiber Nation out of hand as being prohibitively expensive.

Instead what we need to be doing is showing that while we'll never reach these goals by having government continue to simply write checks, if we're savvier with how we spend taxpayer dollars we can leverage them to reach these seemingly impossible numbers. As a painfully simplistic example, with $10 billion a year in budget authority, government could distribute $100 billion in loans or loan guarantees.

But the other important point we need to be hitting is that if America wants to remain globally competitive, if we all share the goal of our country being an international broadband leader, than these are the kinds of investments we're going to be needing to realize in our broadband infrastructure.

Regardless of if you think there's a clear and present need for 100Mbps and beyond today, that's where the rest of the world is heading, and some countries are already there.

Put another way, if we can't find a way to incentivize hundreds of billions more investment in our country's broadband infrastructure, then we can't and won't be a global leader in broadband. It's that simple.