With governments around the world spending billions of dollars trying to prop up ailing economies, many are taking advantage of this flood of stimulus money to address perceived shortcomings in broadband penetration. On the surface, this makes sense — most agree that high-speed Internet access infrastructure is a vital, high-tech equivalent to the public works projects that might have consumed such taxpayer largess in the past. But closer inspection raises questions as to whether or not “penetration” is the right metric to evaluate the health of broadband infrastructure. A case can be made that it is now time to shift our focus from promoting penetration to improving broadband quality.
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