NII, Competing Visions

From the cable industry point of view the funding for the National Information Infrastructure is largely coming directly from their pockets and will come indirectly from the users. From their point of view the creation of the NII should be, and is being, driven mainly by market forces.

Demand for services should drive upgrades. The focus of the technological efforts of cable, telcos, and other carriers should be determined by what people want - by meeting definable, measurable needs. Cable operators believe it would be folly, in a capital-intensive business like telecommunications, to undertake a large, redundant upgrade of the telco plant in hopes of inventing a market.

In their view,

A government effort to fund such a network could end up in the annals of oil shale, supersonic transport, and breeder reactors: all governmentally funded R&D efforts that ended up, as they say in the oil patch, as "dry holes.

Since the cable industry is carrying the burden of developing and deploying these systems, at an expected cost of , ultimately, $10 to 20 billion for an operator like TCI, it is extremely necessary for the services provided on these systems to, at least initially, to be of high financial return (see NII, Competing Visions: Cable/Content). From a cable provider's point of view they are creating a commercial service. They believe, in fact, that they are providing a public a service by not burdening the tax payer with the cost of creating the NII.

Cable is carrying out this ambitious fiber trunking program with no public funding, federal or otherwise. In fact, cable, unlike telcos, was a major contributor to municipalities, adding about $900 million to city revenues through franchise fees in 1992.