Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting "average" bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas, rather than gett

Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting "average" bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas, rather than getting "ultra-high-speed" bandwidth to the top 5 percent, in university towns, who will invent the future. Well - this is because our political parties have come to the consensus that in order to be successful in elections, city issues must be kept out of the discussion. http://salon.com/a/sE_2zAA http://salon.com/a/sE_2zAA “The core of the Republican constituency in metropolitan America are the growing, racially and economically exclusive ‘outer suburbs’ whose privileged status Republicans seek to protect at all costs,” says former mayor of Albuquerque David Rusk, now a consultant. He cited New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as an exemplar of the trend. Democrats are equally to blame: Republicans saw little gain by reaching out to minority voters (the quixotic efforts of GOP maverick Jack Kemp excepted) and Democrats feared that if they put too much effort into solving urban problems, says University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue, they would reinforce their image as the party of ‘special interests.’ That is root-cause of the difficulty of the "last-mile" delivery of broadband. Our society at the end of WWII decided to give ourselves a huge present for winning the war, in the form of an Interstate Highway System, and the politics of suburban sprawl that resulted has stymied efforts to build any serious broadband and mass transit systems that we require to continue strong economic growth and improve national security.