iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| $44 BEEEEELLLLLION dollars That's a lot of money.
No seriously, if we're looking at 50 million non-broadband US peeps, that's $880 per person, enough to give each of them a year of cellular broadband service on the likes of Millenicom. Assuming they're all in different households. If not, the pircutre gets even rosier...like running fiber to lots of those people and paying for WiMAX equipment for the rest.
Or $146.67 for every US citizen, likely enough to make ADSL2+ available to everyone, I'd think. Everyone. At a decent price.
Waitaminute...$146.67 per CITIZEN? Sounds like that's gonna come out of everyone's taxes. Howzat gonna work? You can buy a few years of dialup for that much...or do other stuff. Or you can *not* pass the cost on, leaving gov't even more in debt.
Then again, we just spent $700+B on bailouts, so...yeah...
How about offering tax rebates to broadband providers if they either
a) Use those rebates to roll out more service
b) Pass that rebate directly to customers' bills?
So Comcast could get a tax rebate of, say, $176.4M, for taking $1 per month off of all their customers' bills for a year. No rate hikes would be allowed in order to collect on this break, so the fat cats can't walk away with anything. Or they spend that money upgrading Colorado to DOCSIS 3. Of course, there'd be a limit to the amount of taxes taken off: the amount of taxes owed in the first place.
Just a random outta-my-butt thought.
Seriously tho9ugh, where would that munny come from anyway? Don't get me wrong, I'd love 100/100 FTTH both to my in-town apartment and to my parents' house a few miles out of town, but what's the overhead here? Mind if loyal BBR users were on the board to make sure the companies didn't take money and run? We'll work cheap, just give us 100 Mbit symmetric fiber to do our oversight over :-D |
