The economic reality of varied broadband deployments is that communities with the fastest speeds are most likely to benefit from competition among providers, which further pushes prices down. Thus, we soon will have a divide in which certain dense and high-income communities will have multiple choices for affordable gigabit services, while less dense, lower-income communities may still be stuck with a DSL offering that is 100 times slower but similarly priced. In between the two extremes, there will be places with more or less gigabit offerings, with the gap in price and performance of the best and the worst markets greater than it is today, with many more communities believing they are either being charged too much or otherwise left behind. All signs point toward the gap between the services and value offered to the wealthiest and the poorest continuing to grow throughout the United States. So what can the public sector do to address the gaps?

1. No government should impose build-out requirements on telecommunications companies. In today’s market, an obligation to build everywhere could result in building nowhere.

2. Governments need to do better in collecting and analyzing data. While we consider how broadly market forces will drive next-generation deployments, governments should improve their mapping of broadband availability and pricing to more accurately define the geographic and demographic parameters of the digital divide and guide future actions.

3. Federal, state, and local governments should send carriers clear signals about their goals. At some point, government forces are likely to respond to constituent concerns about being left behind and use public funds to subsidize unserved or underserved areas. Carriers do not want the government to do so where they believe a business case exists for pure private funding. The government should be clear now about how long it will wait, and the network performance it needs, before it will take action. This will give private enterprises incentives to clarify and accelerate deployment plans.

4. Rural communities need a restructured program to provide more effective tools for addressing their broadband deficits. 

5. Policies should empower local governments, which are most likely to understand and care about the specific nature of the local digital divides, in both rural and metropolitan areas. They, far more than the FCC, know where the holes will be and will be accountable to local concerns. Further, local governments can deploy a number of appropriate incentives for companies to build more broadly. 

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program. He serves as the executive director of Gig.U: The Next Generation Network Innovation Project, an initiative of three dozen leading research university communities seeking to support educational and economic development by accelerating the deployment of next generation networks. He also serves as an advisor to a variety of non-profits with a mission of deploying or using broadband technology to advance social progress. Previously, he oversaw the development of a National Broadband Plan.]