Bridging the Broadband Chasm

For an American in 2009, broadband internet access, has become a necessity not a luxury. The internet has allowed so many wonderful advancements in the last 15 years. We have been able to mail messages and share candid photos instantly. Can you imagine shopping for a rare and hard to find object before Amazon and Ebay? Who misses booking their flights with travel agents? Is it more relaxing to look up a piece of information on a DMV website comfortably at home in your pajamas or to tediously wait in a room filled with strangers? Simply put, online access has transformed the world.
Online access is not a luxury. A luxury is a sumptuous enjoyment (OED, 2^nd Edition, Volume IX) . They are not critical to success. Champagne is a luxury. A Rolex watch is also a luxury. Luxuries are not a necessity. A person could survive, and even flourish with an inexpensive Timex watch, or a glass of water. Such is not the case when it comes to investing in a person which is a necessity these days. Self improvement in today's global and difficult economy means constantly adding skills to one's repertoire. With that in mind, is it easier to learn from a textbook that might become outdated the moment it arrives in a student's hands, or an immersive up-to-date interactive video presented by the master of the subject? That is the difference between using dial up internet access, which takes hours upon hours to download a single half hour video tutorial, or broadband access that brings you that half hour video in precisely thirty minutes. Broadband access means that we can have information on demand when it is convenient and necessary.
Having information at hand makes being an informed citizen and voter that much easier, and more effective. In earlier elections supporters of a candidate or issue would have had to rely upon newspapers, radio, and television. As the economy struggles on, newspapers are going out of business and disappearing, or are forced to limit the scope of the news they cover. In order to save costs many publishers have placed their expanded coverage about public policy, and other issues of political and social concern in their digital editions exclusively. Further, with the maturation of social networks like Facebook, and the growing use of text message services like Twitter, Americans who are not online are increasingly at risk of being in the dark about critical information that is needed as it occurs. Use of these social networks made it possible for the LA Fire Department to instantly warn citizens of Los Angeles about raging fires that were putting their homes at risk (Collins, Hilton) in areas where radio and television signals were difficult to receive. Students who have had to coordinate a study session or student project by email, instant message, or text message are intimately familiar with how powerful leveraging such technologies can be.
Expanding broadband internet access to every single citizen in the United States is expensive, no doubt about it, but it has also been shown to increase worker productivity, and business innovation. Businesses expose their products and services to more customers beyond their regional location and consumers benefit from the increased competition that drives down the prices of these products and services. Putting more citizens online gives them access to these benefits. These gains, and the ability of Internet Service Providers to charge for access to these new subscribers more than makes up for the expense of installing universal broadband access over the next decade.
At one time telephones and televisions were considered luxuries. Not every family owned one, but eventually they became ubiquitous because they proved to be extremely useful. It is time that we also make this leap of common sense with broadband internet access. No longer can we reasonably take the position that computers and technology are merely fun.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the 2009 U.S. Population was approximately 307 million citizens and the Pew Research Center recently conducted a survey that discovered that nearly 25% of those citizens are not online. Twenty nine million of them cited that their reasons for not being online were that getting online was too expensive and difficult, or simply wasn't available where they live. As voters and consumers we can pressure government and private enterprise to change that!
We cannot say that education, economic prosperity, and emergency services are luxuries. They are a necessity for prospering in the United States today, and most importantly they can be made most effectively and easily available to every citizen by providing them broadband internet access. The question becomes not how can we afford to bridge the broadband chasm to every single citizen in the United States, but rather how can we afford not to?