What will 'broadband stimulus' actually do?

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, despite some grumbling, will be very helpful to some providers of last-mile broadband access services in rural areas, to some computing centers and to some firms that can build middle-mile wide area networks that supply enough bandwidth for them to contemplate providing multi-megabit-per-second broadband access in local areas.

It will, for the first time, allocate perhaps $100 million for end user satellite service, for the first time, from the Rural Utilities Service. One can argue all of those are positive outcomes for spending $7.2 billion of taxpayer money. What always should have been clear is that, though helpful, that amount of money is not, and never would have been, enough money to make a huge difference in rural or urban broadband adoption...