Saturday, January 31, 2009 Broadband Stimulus The House passed its version of the stimulus bill earlier this month, of which $6 billon dollars was allocated for broadband deployment, and now the Senate Appropriations Committee has released a draft of its broadband stimulus package, of which $9 billon has been allocated. Yochai Benkler has done an indepth assessment of the two broadband stimulus packages, highlighting some of the new terminology the House bill has added: "The House bill adds some explicit important definitions for understanding broadband. It defines "advanced broadband," for which 75% of the money is marked, as 45 Mbps downstream, 15 Mbps downstream. Now, I continue to be baffled about the willingness to formalize asymmetric speeds as the measure, but this is the first time any formal regulatory requirement has even begun to speak in 21st century terms about what counts as broadband." Agreed - I also noticed that the Senate bill calls for 100 Mbps down/20 Mbps up (though this is only defined for tax credits, not direct spending), which is asymmetric (its a read/*write* web folks) but encouraging in that they are clearly interested in raising the bar in terms of what the telcos have been trying to pass off as "fast enough". <http://blog.communityfiberproject.net/>