Broadband CAPEX means broadband quality.

I usually suffer this stuff in silence, but everyone I work with is on a plane to San Francisco right now. So bear with me.

The folks over at AEI didn’t care for the recent Planet Money episode on US broadband policy. Specifically, the notion that US retail Internet service is abysmal. Which it is. Even the FCC thinks so.

So: they moved the goalposts. Instead of measuring latency, or cost per megabit per second, or anything that would give us a sense of how much we’re paying for a particular quality of service, they argue that US broadband is just fine, because look at all the money we’re spending on it.

This is, of course, ridiculous. The OECD doesn’t measure broadband capital investments because the measure is meaningless and indicates nothing useful. Unless, of course, you’re the US Telecom industry trying to prove that you’re not doing a bad job.