FCC Releases White Paper Improving the Nation’s Digital Infrastructure

The new white paper (posted Jan 23, 2017) comes from the Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis.
From the Introduction:

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about a national-infrastructure plan by highlighting three points relevant to communications, namely:
1. Improving the nation’s digital infrastructure should be a significant part of any national-infrastructure plan, as the economic upside for the country from accelerating investment in broadband is likely greater than from most other areas of infrastructure investment.
2. The primary goal of federal actions with respect to digital infrastructure should be to increase and accelerate profitable, incremental, private-sector investment to achieve at least 98% nationwide deployment of future-proofed, fixed broadband networks.
3. The policy measures that can be used to achieve this goal are: (i) direct funding support to reduce the cost of capital; (ii) changes to the tax code to increase the return on invested capital, and (iii) operations-related actions that enhance the productivity of capex. A national-infrastructure plan should include initiatives in some, or all, of these categories.

Direct to Full Text (8 pages; PDF)
See Also: Cybersecurity Risk Reduction (Another New White Paper from FCC)

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