Project to rebuild Internet gets $12M, bandwidth

"The bandwidth is thousands of times faster than standard home broadband connections - enough to run 30 high-quality movies into your home simultaneously.

:Drool:
wow 12 million thats it? seems a lil small.. Congress better approve funding.

Why are taxpayers funding this? According to my cable bill, I'm already paying for internet access! What a load of crap. Let the providers foot the bill, I'm not paying them twice.

yeah i guess thats true. i dont know too much about it, but i heard we pay the providers extra each month to help them upgrade their systems. too bad i havent gotten an upgrade in a long time, thanks comcast :P

Glis, the cable and phone lines that make up the internet are paid for like this.

1. You pay your bill
2. Your provider pays the government
3. The government pays for land access, construction, and maintenance through subcontractor who is the lowest bidder(sometimes your provider, sometimes not).

The money for new lines is covered by the government, which is then earned back when service providers begin charging.

Faster internet is vital to national security and the economy.

$12 million dollars! Let's see, what's the value of the internet in terms of productivity, advancements in science, engineering, medicine? $10 trillion, $100 trillion...? And, we're going to spend a whopping $12 million on next generation research. The number should be in the billions.

But, that's ok. Our wise leaders just agreed to give $48 billion to African nations for aids prevention and $30 billion to some investment bankers who made a few mistakes. Probably difficult to come up with the $12 million at this time.

woah you's are so lucky! I wish the uk government would make a new internet for us at that sort of speeds. Oh wait, if they did that there would be no porn, no p2p file sharing, more police online than on the streets and many other freedoms of speech would be lost. But that would only be our government since they like to act as the nanny state who think they know what's best for us.

yeah they shouldnt have bailed out fannie and morgan, just break up the companies into 6-12 smaller companies and reintroduce them into the market, like CAPITALISM should be.

Glis & StevenL,
I see it more like this.
1)Government takes as much money as it can from as many sources that it can & puts it one bucket.
2)Government spends everything in the bucket and much much more.

I would prefer that the government lower their spending, not borrow money and spend only what we give them. I however agree with you Steven that this is vital and should be in the budget.

Glis, the cable and phone lines that make up the internet are paid for like this.

1. You pay your bill
2. Your provider pays the government
3. The government pays for land access, construction, and maintenance through subcontractor who is the lowest bidder(sometimes your provider, sometimes not).

The money for new lines is covered by the government, which is then earned back when service providers begin charging.

Faster internet is vital to national security and the economy.

Except that it doesn't happen like that. Ask a phone company linesman.

Verizon is regularly pissed at local telecoms/cable companies because they get to use the poles/lines Verizon paid for at a lower price than it costs them to put them up. I understand tha comcast and some others use subcontractors to do the work, but I understood that generally phone companies pay to put their lines up.

@Dustin: Your right about the "bucket", I was stating it the way the government outlines it.

@Glis: I don't think a phone company linesman is a great person to get information concerning macroeconomics and government spending.

The phone companies get subsidies from local, state, and the federal government to cover these costs.