Broadband creates jobs

As the U.S. economy struggles to recover from the worst recession since the 1930s with the unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent, the federal government is understandably focused on policies that could create jobs. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is putting the final touches on a National Broadband Plan. Unfortunately, few policymakers understand how much the deployment of new telecommunications technologies that underlie the broadband revolution have contributed to employment in the private economy. The National Broadband Plan should be carefully designed so as not to reduce the investment in broadband technologies, which have averaged $30 billion per year since 2005.
During the 2008-09 recession, total private nonresidential capital spending declined by more than 18 percent, but spending by telcos, cable operators, and wireless firms on broadband remained steady, declining by a bare 3 percent. The massive investments made in mobile and wired Internet capacity by the major network providers has sustained hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past six years, and we project that capital investment in broadband over the next few years would create approximately 509,000 jobs relative to a world without such investment.