Taiwan joins the growing list of countries that have nationwide strategies for providing some kind of broadband everywhere. The government has inked a $209 million dollar agreement with Intel to build an island-wide WiMax network.
Taiwan is much smaller than many U.S. states, but nonetheless, can you point to a single U.S. state that has put any significant funds behind a statewide broadband initiative?
Neither can I.
The odd thing is that states continue to dump tens and hundreds of millions of dollars into traditional economic development recruitment strategies to bring (typically) Manufacturing Economy businesses into a state, rather than attending to basic infrastructure improvements that would boost the opportunities of thousands or tens of thousands of smaller businesses. And keep in mind that all the job growth is in those small businesses (25 employees or less).
So state leaders dump millions into a single business and ignore all the businesses already in the state. And in Virginia, the state has had to sue some companies that took millions in incentives and then did not create jobs or move.
There are no technology problems. We have a lot of leadership problems, though, and the only thing that will fix that is an ongoing program to better educate our leaders on the issues and what we expect them to do.