Content may be king, but it needs a royal road on which to travel. Economic guru John Rutledge comments:

Too many people, including the regulators, are worrying about the 20th century stories, like Renovo acquiring IBM. These are PCs in boxes, hard assets, and they are not the source of advances in technology.

Right now, the game is how fast and how wide you can make broadband and fiber wireless coverage. In the U.S., broadband is strung across the country like Christmas lights between the NFL cities—and that’s not a joke. China is bringing high speed access into small towns all over the country and using it for education and technology. Here in the U.S., we've gone from number 1 to number 16 in the world in the last five-years. China is doing things to promote the development of high speed communications while we are doing things to retard it. China is about expanding fiber. The big story in America is about whether we will get rid of the $3 a month “temporary” telecom tax that we put in to finance the Spanish-American war 109 years ago. We don't get it, but China does. This is a very dangerous situation for U.S. service companies and our next generation of workers, because without that access, they just can’t compete.

The last 5-years have seen the collapse of telecom capital spending in the U.S. largely due to the 1996 Telecom Act. That law is being rewritten now in Congress. If Congress gets that right, we will see capital spending coming back on here in the U.S. Telecom and communications investment is booming already in Asia and most of the rest of the world.

posted by James DeLong @ 8:02 AM | Infrastructure

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