It was July of 2009 when the applications for BTOP and BIB awards were due. It's January 2010 and shovel ready awards have been granted mainly for middle mile projects. Where are the rest of the awards?

We can look at the failure of Muni Wi-Fi (last mentioned when EarthLink's wi-fi network in Phillie was acquired by the city for $2M). We can witness the Duopoly fighting muni fiber projects - see LUS in Lafayette, LA or GreenLight in Wilson, NC. Instead of providing the community with a fiber network that was promised many times since 1999, it spends build-out money on lawyers, advertising, and lobbying. 

Two things: 

One is 1999. Since 1999, Verizon and other ILEC's have gotten numerous rate hikes on the promise of broadband roll out. Check your PUC hearings minutes about the rate hikes. That's 10 years of waiting -- and the only reason the ILEC's even started DSL was due to the emergence of Covad, Rhythms and Northpoint. (The IPO's for these companies certainly had an impact). Impedance - that's all we have seen from the ILEC's.

Two is opposition. The Duopoly pf cable and telco doesn't want to fight a third provider, especially a government backed one. The figure I saw was $500K for what Lafayette spent fighting BellSouth and Cox. Tax dollars fought by rate hike dollars. Nice, huh?

Now we have the newly created CenturyLink is trying to block a company from getting broadband money for a region that CenturyLink doesn't even provide DSL in. 

The system is broken for sure. Entrenched, moneyed incumbants who are actually hurting the American economy. It doesn't help that ConnectNation is the company doing the mapping. "Connected Nation is set up by the same broadband incumbents who don't want competition, guess how accurate those maps will be?"  Your tax dollars at work helping to keep the incumbant fat and happy. Too big to fail? I think it's too big it needs to be broken up like BT.