Economic evidence from US

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Recent studies estimate that accelerating broadband deployment in the US would have a total annual economic impact of $134 billion. Additional economic impacts show the potential for a further $130 billion across healthcare, education, job creation and retention, environmental impact etc.

This has led to a lobby of a broad-based alliance (healthcare, farming, education, telcos etc) to urge Congress to adopt a national policy for broadband mapping, public=private -partnerships for deployment and more. The full article is available here.

The UK needs to move forwards along these lines too. Mapping existing infrastructure that can be used more effectively (ducts, poles and masts for instance), deployment, notspots, and determinning where there are going to be gaps and underserved areas, where public-private-co-operative partnerships could be the best solution.

In order to do this correctly though, there needs to be clear definitions of the services available, as per the post yesterday about defining NGA/broadband to ensure that further digital divides are not created through misunderstandings and lack of clarity.