Increased US Broadband Adoption Could Create 2.4 Million Jobs

Ward D points out a story about a recent study that predicts significant economic growth through increased broadband adoption in the U.S. The study is based on a program in Kentucky that has, through the increased use of broadband, "saved an average of more than $200 per person per year" on health-care services, and decreased the average amount of time residents spent driving by 100 hours per month. From Computerworld: "The Connected Nation model ... focuses more on broadband adoption and local needs than huge, government-funded programs. Several Kentucky businesses have benefited from the increased access, according to Connected Nation. Geek Squad, the Best Buy subsidiary, moved its headquarters to Bullitt County, Kentucky, in late 2006 because of the broadband availability."

Nice idea, but possibly dubious math

[postbigbang (761081)]

A few lucky economic development wins doesn't constitute rapid job growth. I'm glad people shop online and glad they save fuel. But so far, no one has shown direct, only indirect benefits..... not job creation (save for nebulous 'tech' jobs) or anything else than infrastructure maintenance positions (truck rollers, moles, linemen, and so forth). It would be nice if there could be an easier quid pro quo data set that motivated communities (and not to get in bed with telcos without titanium strings attached to the deals). Look at the problems with muni-wifi, the failures of WiMAX, and the sheer dominance of the telcos. Community networking is in a sad state, and this study, sadly, doesn't help.

Re:Nice idea, but possibly dubious math

[webmaster404 (1148909)]

Think of it this way. Its very hard to run an online business on dial up. The more broadband we have here in the US the faster tech jobs will grow because people can actually use the internet. For example, downloading Linux ISOs, on a decent connection it might take an hour at the most, with dial up that could take days. Also dial-up users are less likely to download programs because a good sized program may take 10 minutes on dial up but take a few seconds on broadband. This is by far good news for Linux people and to people wanting more tech jobs.

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[schnikies79 (788746)]

Think about it this way. We need more than just tech jobs.

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

That's an easy trap to fall into. Non-tech businesses benefit from broadband too.

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[schnikies79 (788746)]

I should have worded that better. I agree that non-tech companies benefit from broadband, I was just commenting on his tech industry stance and stating broadband is more important than just creating more tech jobs.

Re:Nice idea, but possibly dubious math

[schnikies79 (788746)]

I live in a red state (very southern Indiana, and in a very rural area) and hicks or not, they are not dumb rednecks, nor is my community bigoted. Everyone gets along quite well thank you. If you know anything about Indiana, you would know there is a large push to get hi-tech industry here (by a republican governor, oh my gosh), and it's working.

Personally, I don't work in IT and have no desire what-so-ever to be in that line of work (I'm a chemist), but plenty of people are. I'm sorry that you don't like the Midwest, but your stereotypes are just plain wrong. Don't think for a second there is no hi-tech work or expertise.

From my experience, the IT folks are usually the anti-social type and really aren't that fun to be around.

Re:Nice idea, but possibly dubious math

[palegray.net (1195047)]

Where as the reality is, company deploy computer systems and make use of the internet to make productivity savings.

You know, the advent of the assembly line marked a new era of cost savings in manufacturing, but it also opened up a lot of jobs for engineers and other workers. It's the nature of progress; adapt or die. Nobody has an inherent right to a job, but it is everyone's personal responsibility to take steps to make sure their skills stay relevant. If a particular skill becomes obsolete or subject to significantly less demand, the burden lies on the individual to find another way to make himself economically valuable.

Re:Nice idea, but possibly dubious math

[DM9290 (797337)]

Where as the reality is, company deploy computer systems and make use of the internet to make productivity savings.

You know, the advent of the assembly line marked a new era of cost savings in manufacturing, but it also opened up a lot of jobs for engineers and other workers. It's the nature of progress; adapt or die. Nobody has an inherent right to a job, but it is everyone's personal responsibility to take steps to make sure their skills stay relevant. If a particular skill becomes obsolete or subject to significantly less demand, the burden lies on the individual to find another way to make himself economically valuable.

when you say "cost savings" what you mean is "the boss/lord can now throw a bunch of people off his land".

Don't all living things have an inherent right to to take what they need from the environment in order to survive and reproduce?

Imagine if a king, upon discovering a method of "Cost savings" decided to throw his surplus subjects into the ocean? He decries "there is no inherent RIGHT to be my subject and leech off my *MY* kingdom. The burden is on you to make yourself useful to me! Don't come back until you are useful."

As a property owner, you are merely a manager of wealth. there is nothing NATURAL that makes any wealth the exclusive property of a single being to enjoy. All the wealth of the world is naturally commonly shared by all the life of the world.

If you have taken it upon yourself to be "wealthy" then you have a duty to manage that wealth in a way that benefits all. and you have a moral duty for the welfare of your employees. you can tell yourself its ok to just 'let them go free'. But you dictated their level of education while they worked for you, by controlling the amount of free time they have and their work conditions. If you expect them to have skills for future occupations.. you must provide those skills.. otherwise you are a dictator and a tyrant and have no right to complain when the workers revolt and take the means of their survival into their own hands (and perhaps take your head in the bargain).

In general, all employers conspire to minimize the education and marketability of their workers. employers don't want mobile workers because such workers cost the most money. And any skills they posssess that don't go to their job, actually reduce their productivity. The wealthy may enjoy their lavish lifestyles, but it comes with a MORAL DUTY to the rest of mankind. A leader has a duty to his followers. You can't cut them loose in any natural kind of social relationship.

Some of the better monarchs in history understood this. In capitalism we have created a class of petty dictators that want all the benefits of monarchy but none of the responsibilities of leadership.

And then a bunch of wannabe petty dictators who go around blathering about now 'natural' and 'inherent' it all is.

Think of it this way.

[falconwolf (725481)]

Its very hard to run an online business on dial up.

Ah but what businesses, and jobs, will be created? TFA says 2.4 million jobs will be created but it does not name 1 job. All it is really about is money saved and not jobs created. Then again the study itself does not say what jobs wll be created.

Falcon

Re:Think of it this way.

[Cornelius the Great (555189)]

2.4 million jobs would include more domain squatters, spyware/adware authors, Nigerian scam artists, and V!4gr4 spammers.

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[CSMatt (1175471)]

Aren't most distros sold or given away on pressed CDs, if not from the distro maker then at least from third-party online stores? Why not just buy one of those and make several copies?

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[tomhudson (43916)]

The math is more than dubious - its impossible:

decreased the average amount of time residents spent driving by 100 hours per month

Do you really believe that people drove 25 hours less every week - 5 hours less every day, Monday to Friday?

From the stupid article:

Using broadband for health-care services has saved an average of more than $200 per person per year in Kentucky, and residents there drove more than 100 fewer hours per month because of transactions done online, according to the study.

If we

Should say miles, not hours

[AlpineR (32307)]

From the report:

In the 2007 ConnectKentucky residential survey, 66% of broadband users report driving an average of 102 fewer miles per month because of their online activity.

The error is in the Computerworld article which misstates:

[R]esidents there drove more than 100 fewer hours per month because of transactions done online.

Re:Should say miles, not hours

[tomhudson (43916)]

There's lies, damned lies, and statistics.

66% of broadband users report driving an average of 102 fewer miles per month

This tells us nothing. if the other 34% drove 200 more miles per month ( 50 miles/week - for example, to look at stuff they found on cragislist, or to meet people they chatted with online) then there are zero savings in driving distances. The fact that they didn't give an overall figure shows they cherry-picked, and the real savings is more like 25 miles/month overall.

Another bogus claim:

$35 billion in value from 3.8 billion hours saved per year from accessing broadband at home

WTF is that supposed to mean? That people will suddenly be saving $9.50 /hr for every hour they surf the net form home? That's not my experience. Or maybe they're trying to claim that, if people can access the tubes from home, they won't at work ... saving their employers $35 billion. Guess they didn't see the studies that showed 70% of all porn is accessed from work ...

The "study" is bogus. Its an attempt from the telcos to get more "incentives" from the government.

Enonomist math

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

"What do you want the numbers to say? We'll torture them until they say it!"

These studies are such a crock and use very dodgy extrapolations. Of course I didn't RTFA, but they're generally along the lines of: Give a company 56k dialup and they become 20% more profitable. Therefore is we give them 2Mbits they will become 20% * 2M/56k = 700%. Or: a survey shows a correlation between company size and bandwidth. Larger companies tend to have more bandwidth than smaller companies. Therefore we will give all the

I think you have the answer already

[zappepcs (820751)]

Look at the problems with muni-wifi, the failures of WiMAX, and the sheer dominance of the telcos. Community networking is in a sad state, and this study, sadly, doesn't help.

(emphasis mine)

The sheer dominance of telcos is what is causing the problem with increased broadband deployment, when you include cable operators in that group. Very little is being done among that group to GROW their business. I know that Verizon is doing FTTH and that is good, and T-Mobile is doing the WiFi hand off phones which is good. The trouble is that this is a day late and a dollar short.

FTTH is not helping improve overall broadband deployment - it is there to compete with incumbent cable players

MOD PARENT UP

[Curunir_wolf (588405)]

This is spot-on. The lack of long-term investment in communications infrastructure is slowing down progress. Fix that and everything will take off.

Re:

[hairyfeet (841228)]

And it isn't just greed either.True story---A few years back a guy I went to school with worked at a little tv/appliance/pc shop outside of town.Nobody would run broadband there,and the dialup was pitiful(14k on a good day).So he talks his boss into paying out the rear to have a T1 run the 15 miles to the shop.He had already talked to the neighbors and other local shops and they were happy to hand him $50-100 a month depending on their needs and take a piece of the T1.He gets everyone wired up,sets up a ser

Wireless

[simpl3x (238301)]

And, I bet that free wireless will create even more! Better broadband is great, but most of our "surfing" isn't really useful, whereas searches on mobile devices likely tend towards needs. As with the iPhone and Google searches, and I can attest to it, making it available makes it happen. Quick, easy, and slow...

How much more gets done with 1gps versus 128k? Not much IMHO.

Re:

[The Orange Mage (1057436)]

Are you saying a 128k connection should be enough for anybody?

Re:Wireless

[simpl3x (238301)]

Oh no, but 640 should be!

Increased US Broadband Adoption Could Create

[falconwolf (725481)]

2.4 million jobs.

And what jobs are those? TFA doesn't say. Sure some temporary jobs would be created to build the infrastructure and a few more permanent jobs will be created to maintain it but what other jobs will be created? /.'s title is a bad one as TFA is more about money saved not jobs created.

Falcon

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[vought (160908)]

Increased US Broadband Adoption Could Create 2.4 Million Jobs

...in tech support.

There. Fixed that for you.

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[n6kuy (172098)]

> > Increased US Broadband Adoption Could Create 2.4 Million Jobs
> ...in tech support.
... In India.

> There. Fixed that for you.

Still had a bug.

"decreased the average amount of time..."

[Ferzerp (83619)]

"decreased the average amount of time residents spent driving by 100 hours per month"

Huh? The average resident now drives 3 hours less per day? Is everyone in KY a truck driver or something?

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[FSWKU (551325)]

Huh? The average resident now drives 3 hours less per day? Is everyone in KY a truck driver or something?

If the 75-90% concentration of "Drivers Wanted" ads in any paper in the state are an indication, yes.

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[kesuki (321456)]

Apparently by resident they meant 'lackey of the local hospital' since the only documents i could find 'driving' savings from were hospitals, that now transmit medical data via computer, instead of sending them by courier to the major hospitals where specialists determine whats wrong etc. and how that creates jobs is beyond me, it sounds like it replaces the job of 'medical document carrier' with no jobs.

perhaps the manufacturer of medical equipment that transmits and allows specialists to return a diagno

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[tompaulco (629533)]

How many days a month do you work? Looks to me like more like 5 hours less per day. So indeed, it sounds like a lot of truckers lost their jobs.

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[compro01 (777531)]

Huh? The average resident now drives 3 hours less per day? Is everyone in KY a truck driver or something?

no, they must just contract their article writing out to the /. editors. the study linked by TFA says the broadband folks tended to drive about 102 fewer miles per month and they somehow came up with "hours". minutes would have been closer.

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[samkass (174571)]

The original report said miles, not hours. The article made a mistake copying the text, apparently.

...$200 Billion...nothing delivered...no consequen

[distantbody (852269)]

Some might think 'what's done is done, it's in the past, it was done a decade ago'. Surely someone is keeping this issue alive because, even with all the time that has since past, there is still a huge public interest that needs to be served by ripping that money back, by whatever means necessary, to send the message that: 'for all of our belief in contractual agreements, and for all of our corrupt, lazy and intimidated politicians and government; no-one so vastly screws with our hard-earned money and future prosperity and gets away with it, regardless of whether it was committed a year ago, ten years ago, or whether the contract set performance penalties or not' I want to see the looks on the executives and senators faces who, long thinking they had got away with it, all-of-a-sudden get the f**k charged out of them. Someone needs to keep this issue alive.

the rest of the story

[by Anonymous Coward]

This is a tech related jobs article which seems to have been accidentally truncated.

Increased US Broadband Adoption Could Create 2.4 Million Jobs in India

fixed

Opportunity cost

[homer_s (799572)]

Whenever some one proposes a great govt. undertaking that will "create jobs"*, ask yourself what the opportunity cost is - in other words, what use would the money have been put to had it not been taken away and invested somewhere else.

*The challenge is not to create jobs, but to create wealth. If the govt.just wants to create jobs, they can hire a million goons to destroy stuff and hire another million people to rebuild stuff - boom, 2 million jobs created.

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[GodfatherofSoul (174979)]

The assumption is inherent that those jobs are to do something productive. If a town builds a new hospital capable of handling 1000 more ER calls a week, that doesn't mean that the cops are going to go around beating people to meet a quota. But, thanks for the clarification, Mr. Norquist.

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[homer_s (799572)]

If the money to build the new hospital was taken away from a sanitation project that could save more lives, then yes, it is a net loss.

That is a simple economic fact, but I feel it is wasted on you since you are intent on childish name calling. Maybe you should be on reddit/digg with the other kids?

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[shadwstalkr (111149)]

If the govt.just wants to create jobs, they can hire a million goons to destroy stuff and hire another million people to rebuild stuff - boom, 2 million jobs created.

Apparently you don't keep up with the news.

They don't explain what they mean by broadband

[grandpa-geek (981017)]

From their document, this looks like a front for the cable industry and the telcos who are peddling what they call broadband. Their "broadband" is really at dumbed down legacy speeds compared to what other countries in the world are doing.

Real broadband is gigabit speed, bi-directional, to homes and small businesses. It allows every subscriber to become a content provider. The cable industry sees itself as being part of the entertainment industry, and the telcos would like to join the broadband-as-entertainment model. Real broadband scares the entertainment industry because they see it as a challenge to their business model.

The economic impact of real broadband would be immense. I like to analogize the comparison of legacy broadband to real broadband as the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit, innovators will try to work out ways of getting two horses to work together. If power comes from engines, innovation goes to a much higher level. Innovators in countries with with real broadband can conceive ideas that American innovators can't even imagine.

The sponsors of this report are pushing legislation. I would urge people to examine the legislation to see how it defines broadband. If it doesn't talk about gigabit to the home, it is part of the trend in which the US is becoming a third world telecommunications country to protect entertainment business models.

Re:They don't explain what they mean by broadband

[kamapuaa (555446)]

In Japan, very fast broadband is common, but online shopping is much less popular in Japan than in the US, and in fact Japanese people are more likely to use their cell phones to browse the Internet than their broadband connections - mostly for chatting, which could easily be done on a 2400 baud modem. The Japanese software industry sucks, their economy has been in an 18 year rut...

Just saying "the economic impact of real broadband would be immense" isn't enough. What would be the economic impact? You vaguely mention "people becoming content providers", but isn't Youtube a better model than running your own server off broadband for this? Why is Youtube popular in Japan? And why haven't amazing new business models been developed in nations that do have near-universal broadband?

Anyway, generally speaking, broadband is easily and widely available in the US as long as you live in an urban or semi-populated area. Any business model would revolve around them, not people in the countryside or people who just haven't bothered upgrading from AOL, because it's good enough for e-mail.

More Comcast Support Technicians Needed...

[creimer (824291)]

"The reason why your super-mega fast connection is behaving like a 300 baud modem is that you downloaded an illegal MP3 with some naughty bits. Next time, please download a legitimate MP3 file with no naughty bits from one of our approved sponsors if you want to maintain faster service."

In other news

[bagsc (254194)]

Infrastructure reduces costs. Reduced costs increase consumption, which increases jobs. The question is not whether the infrastructure is beneficial (it is), but whether it is the best use of money given the risks. Of course AT&T thinks the government paying for their broadband network is good for the world.

You know what would create even more jobs?

[MikeRT (947531)]

Having a political party come into office that is dedicated to taking an engineer's eye to fixing the legal code of the entire state. The last figure I saw for the cost to businesses to comply with federal income tax requirements was $289B. Just going to a flat tax would be an automatic release of $289B worth of labor! There are so many messed up statutes and regulations that a savvy political party wouldn't even need to do much in the way of cutting taxes. All it would have to do is start repealing old law

Jobs going fast! Sign up now! Only 2.3 mln left!

[prostoalex (308614)]

Top jobs created by broadband adoption:

1) Comcast traffic filterer
2) MPAA P2P network monitor
3) DMCA takedown notices writer
4) RIAA fake torrent uploader
5) Botnet senior manager
6) Senior wiretap installer

broadband vs. green tech

[heroine (1220)]

For all the trillions of dollars pouring into alternative fuels, hybrid cars, & transportation taxes, all it would take to solve most of this problem is willingness to let workers telecommute.

It's like living in a parallel universe where we sit in traffic 10 hours a week & spend half our income getting to work with all these unused internet cables sitting just a few feet away.

Re:Useless statistical models

[superpulpsicle (533373)]

Useless is right. Service based economy is the last thing we are. Try going to a restaurant there is no waitor/waitresses most of the time. Try calling tech support the wait time on average 10 minutes if you are lucky. Anything having to do with services doesn't pay well. People are not attracted to building a career off low paying jobs. Nobody wants to do it.

Re:Hrm. Geek Squad in Kentucky

[CSMatt (1175471)]

I've always wondered why a group of people that bite off heads of chickens for the amusement of others would organize themselves into a squad. Knowing their location, it all makes sense now.

Re:Hrm. Geek Squad in Kentucky

[omeomi (675045)]

Broadband adoption in the US will really take off only when Hollywood celebrities begin adopting a lot of broadband from Africa. Then it will be all the rage.

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[tompaulco (629533)]

There are 4.1 million people in Kentucky, and the unemployment rate is 5.4%. This article claims that each of the unemployed people in Kentucky will land 10 jobs.

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[martinX (672498)]

How many times have we seen hyperboles such as this which ended up, when actually researched, to be grossly overstated

A million times. At least.

Re:How much did these people drive before?

[QuantumRiff (120817)]

Actually, I can almost believe this. I live in a small town, out in the middle of no-where. You know, Rural. If I want anything other than a Wal-Mart or Homedepot, I have to drive 70 miles over a mountain range. If the pass is nasty (and in the winter it is) I have to drive 120 miles north. Of course, groceries and other necessary items are in my town, but other things aren't. Internet shopping has saved me many trips. Not many small towns have places that specialize in "big and tall" I'm 6'5, with size 15 foot. Clothes and shoe shopping used to be pain, involving day long trips, to hit the other towns. Definitely not 100 hours a month, but a few thousand miles a year.

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[schnikies79 (788746)]

You can force DTV because all you need is an antenna, but for full dial-up replacement you need new infrastructure. For people down the road from me and for others all over the country, dial-up is the only option. Yes I know, 80% of people live in an urban area, but that still leaves 60 million of us that live in rural areas. DSL just became available for me a couple months ago, and at one speed (1.5/384).

Why gives you the right to cut my neighbors off? They are too far away for DSL. The closest area b