FCC Plans Increased Job Opportunities with Broadband Expansion

There’s a big slot of employment vacancies opening up for the next six years. And all thanks to the broadband internet plans by FCC.

The Federal Communications Commission is cooking up a plan to lay down broadband internet in the countryside and this plan, they say, will open up 500,000 job gates over the next six years. This plan is the result of the FCC coming forward to spend billions in order to subsidize broadband business in the countryside.

The rules for the spending have been released and the “high-cost” fund, which is about $4.5 billion, will be used for broadband services instead of the telephone. This money is a part of the agency’s $8 billion universal service system, where communications subsidies to get technology in schools and provisional services for low-income people in cities are also part of the plan.

The funding for a landline service, which many deemed to be an outdated technology, had raised questions over the years. It was only last month that the agency voted a landmark decision to overhaul the high-cost fund to create a “Connect America Fund”.

This plan is aimed to bring broadband closer to 7 million Americans who are currently unable to get a high-speed connection. Here, the profit is non-existent as companies build expensive lines in rural areas with few customers.

Moreover, the effort will bring in a lot of employment opportunities for the people. Statistically speaking, that’s 111,111 jobs created per billion dollars in spending.

The FCC explained the job created per spending. “Conservatively, a 1 percent increase in broadband deployment will increase the rate of employment by between 0.14 and 0.5 percentage point,” an FCC spokesman said by e-mail. “Over the next five years, we expect 3.6 million rural households to gain access to high-speed Internet through our reforms, a gain of about 10.2 percent. The 10.2 percent deployment gain could increase employment by between 1.45-4.11 percentage points, creating between 320,000 to 905,000 more jobs, based on a rural workforce of 22 million.”