Bret Swanson from Entropy Economics recently published a report that looks at US broadband from 2000 to date. The growth in those years has been amazing. No news there. He give some blame to lack of ready broadband for  the Telecom bust in 2000. Developers were there with the vision but the broadband wasn’t there to provide the power to back up those visions. I hadn’t thought about that before but found it interesting. He credits new technology, new business models and relaxed regulation for growth that happened after 2002.

There were a couple of recommendations that I wanted to pull directly from the report

Indeed, bandwidth must grow if we (1) merely want to accommodate the bandwidth-hungry applications already in the pipeline; and, crucially, (2) want new generations of unpredictable innovations in software, services , applications, and devices that all use bandwidth as a key resource.

And

Continued investment on this scale and beyond will be required to: (1) deliver more bandwidth to ever more consumers and to enlarge geographic coverage areas; (2) drive new innovations in crucial sectors like education and health care; and (3) accommodate rapid compound data traffic growth with ever-greater real-time latency and quality-of-service requirements.

There are some more great charts that track broadband in the last 8 years – but I think the focus on investment as shown in the chart above is particularly pertinent as we decide how to invest money to stimulate our economy today. Looking at how we got beyond the telecom bust is helpful as is the look at hard number investment.