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There are countries where this is being done. Uruguay is tiny and highly urbanized, but it's got a goal of achieving this very thing. Every phone line in the country, there are only about 900,000, comes with free no cost broadband. You get 1GB of traffic free, an extra GB of traffic if you visit educational sites associated with One Laptop Per Child. Speaking of which, every child in the country gets a laptop, so they can get online. So they've achieved two goals of universal access already. They gave everybody a computer and everybody a slow but free internet connection. Now that they achieved that, they are rolling out fiber to the country. So far it's just in some neighborhoods of the capital, but if you can get it's a pretty good deal 120M fiber connection for $83 USD per month. Beyond fixed line internet, there's 3G/4G coverage over every city/town/village with good bandwidth (i got 5m up / down last time i tried it). How did they do this? The government treats getting good internet access as a human right. There's ANTEL, a state telco monopoly which sees it's mission as getting everybody online. There's a viable threat that if ANTEL didn't do it's job, the market could be opened to competition. Bridging the digital divide is a national priority and so Uruguay has chosen to invest heavily in making sure everybody's included and online. As a result, Uruguay has the highest internet penetration rates in Latin America. Other parts of the state, like the energy company is well on it's way to eliminating the need of fossil fuels for electricity production, primarily through hydro and wind power. Utilities are precisely places where the state can, has, and should continue to provide a common level of service everybody can expect. Getting universal internet access, cheap and fast, is something any country can achieve if they decide it's important. If a tiny country in south american you've never heard of with $15k gdp per capita and 3.8 cows per person can do it, the wealthiest country in the world should be able to pull it off. |