International Telecommunications Society

Rural Broadband and the Unrecovered Cost of Streaming Video Entertainment

This paper describes the challenge of four rural broadband providers operating fiber to the home networks to recover the middle mile network costs of streaming video entertainment and quantifies the amount of the current and future shortfall. It describes the components of the rural broadband networks, policy background for their evolution, an overview of providers, and the financial calculations of cost recovery. The preliminary results show that current broadband prices are approximately $50 per month per subscriber.