President Obama’s call to action on municipal broadband has more local governments trying to jump on a bandwagon that would take taxpayers down a costly road.
As NTU’s own study “Municipal Broadband: Wired to Waste” showed, Government Owned Networks (GONs) have proven to be mismanaged, wasteful messes that do not erase the digital divide, but just make it more expensive to cross.
Unlike the stated goals, these networks do not erase the digital divide because too often, it costs too much – even after massive taxpayer subsidies – for the average citizen to connect. Municipal governments are simply not equipped to properly manage the complexities of building and managing complex fiber-optic networks.
The government’s road to more widespread broadband is paved in the detritus of expensive failures that have left hundreds of thousands of taxpayers paying the bill. The President’s plans would burden an untold number of additional taxpayers with these misguided enterprises – and NTU has the stories to prove it!
Throughout the month, we will expose a “February Fail” each day showing how government meddling in broadband expansion has ended disastrously for consumers and taxpayers.
You can help us by sharing these examples through Twitter via the hashtag #febfail or by visiting the campaign’s homepage at ntu.org/febfails!