The President’s Executive Order establishing US Ignite came out two-plus years after the FCC introduced the National Broadband Plan (NBP). The goal of the plan is ambitious:

“The United States must lead the world in the number of homes and people with access to affordable, world-class broadband connections. As such, 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 Mbps and actual upload speeds of at least 50 Mbps by 2020. This will create the world’s most attractive market for broadband applications, devices and infrastructure.”

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US Ignite points in the right direction, an effort to build-out the nation’s wireline infrastructure. But his well-intentioned and farsighted effort confronts, head-on, the nation’s telecom giants, the telephone and cable companies led by AT&T, Verizon, throw in Comcast and the other cable companies, who have a very different and self-serving agenda. Working together they are a ‘Communications Trust’, a cartel of companies who have taken control of communications so that they can get rid of regulations, raise rates and block competition.

But the real story is the massive skunkworks campaigns on both the state level, such as what happening in state legislatures, and at the federal level, including the FCC and Congress, to close down all wired services, including the Public Switched Telephone Networks, (PSTN) or DSL service, (which relies on the copper wiring) or even the obligation to provide wireline services in rural areas or where ever they don’t want to serve. At the same time, Verizon and AT&T have been privatizing other parts of the PSTN, such as the advanced services like FiOS or U-Verse, or the profitable business or data services, which use the PSTN wires and plant —- which have been directly funded by phone customers, many times through rate increases for ‘infrastructure’ building.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/broadband-communications-att-verizon_b_1621871.html