The funding under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program is authorized by the $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure law US President Joe Biden championed
“universal” here is meant as “everyone in America can buy it”, right now there are lots of places in rural America where high speed internet just isn’t available at any price (except for satellite, which has its own problems)
Regarding your guess of what it is, it’s kind of even worse than that - this is far from the first initiative like this, and every time the ISPs just pocket the money, do barely any actual expansion, and call it a day.
So at the end of the day, as a country we’ll probably wind up with unchanged (or worse) internet prices, more or less the same coverage in rural areas, and 42b poorer in tax revenue
But hey, some ISP execs are probably going to get some fat bonuses, so we have that to be thankful for
“universal” here is meant as “everyone in America can buy it”, right now there are lots of places in rural America where high speed internet just isn’t available at any price (except for satellite, which has its own problems)
Regarding your guess of what it is, it’s kind of even worse than that - this is far from the first initiative like this, and every time the ISPs just pocket the money, do barely any actual expansion, and call it a day.
So at the end of the day, as a country we’ll probably wind up with unchanged (or worse) internet prices, more or less the same coverage in rural areas, and 42b poorer in tax revenue
But hey, some ISP execs are probably going to get some fat bonuses, so we have that to be thankful for