For the past couple of months, among other areas of work, I have been consulting for the Federal Communications Commission on the National Broadband Plan. If you’re unfamiliar, the executive summary abides:

Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a National Broadband Plan to ensure every American has “access to broadband capability.” Congress also required that this plan include a detailed strategy for achieving affordability and maximizing use of broadband to advance “consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety and homeland security, community development, health care delivery, energy independence and efficiency, education, employee training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation and economic growth, and other national purposes.”

On April 28, 2010, the FCC released their very first technical paper on the National Broadband Plan. It was the first in a series of followup documents that the FCC promised in their initial March 15 outline. These followups are intended to address, among other things, the details! As in, who’s unserved? How big is the broadband availability gap? What assumptions were made during the process? And eventually: how much is it going to cost? And how do we decide how to divvy up the cash to stimulate building? LOTS of questions.

My part in all this was twofold. First, I helped fashion the recurring and nonrecurring expenses that would be incurred on operating a broadband network, be it cable, wireless, or wireline technology. And second, I helped to develop the broadband adoption curves that would predict take rates for every census block in the country. No small feat!

The full technical paper can be found on the the FCC website – it’s listed under “The Broadband Availability Gap” section. The take rate stuff starts on page 45. My team at Duff & Phelps gets called out for their hard work as well. And to cap off the love, this shows up at the end: “Special Thanks to Arnab Das and Ruben Miranda who, in addition to their work on the wireless modeling and take-rate analysis, respectively, also contributed directly to the related sections of this paper.”

Obviously both of these things are small parts in a much larger effort driven by the FCC and their primary modeling team. But as far as my contributions are concerned, I’m really proud of them.

Sadly, the answer – for the past 2 years and counting – is NO. Sure it looks impressive, connecting to the Austin Convention Center and all. Unfortunately I explained, that’s all it connects to in downtown. No UT, no 6th Street, no Lady Bird Lake trail, no Whole Foods, no Warehouse District, no condos, no Capitol…nothing. OK she continued, so it connects to shopping places like the Domain? Not even the freakin’ Domain. So where does it go? Well, a bunch of parking lots in
the burbs. Who all want to go to the Convention Center? EXACTLY, I said.

Maybe it’s time to admit utter failure of tax dollars at work, as is put aptly here.

Anyway, there’s some help out there for you, if you’re like me. Sandy Leeds, Professor at the McCombs School at UT-Austin, writes a new(ish) blog called Leeds on Finance, essentially summing up the day’s financial news and putting it all into context. This is not unlike what the McCombs Investment Fund (which Leeds oversees, BTW) is tasked with doing. Watching the currents, planning future moves down the road. On top of it all he’s a really funny and cutting writer. Take this excerpt:

The WSJ reports that many bank employees are very unhappy that a large component of their compensation will be stock that they will likely have to hold for three years.  Some claim to have liquidity issues.  I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.  I think that they should fill some basketball arenas with people who don’t have jobs, have quit looking or have accepted part-time employment rather than full-time employment.  It shouldn’t be difficult to find people to sit in the arena, since one in six Americans fall into one of these categories.  Then, the bankers should be allowed to tell the audience their woes.  Lets hear all about their liquidity issues and how they had nothing to do with our economic problems and how their bank was not rescued by the bailout.

Burn!

Honestly, add this guy to your feed already.

No plans for a memorial service have been announced. Wednesday evening, about 50 Lazard partners got together at the companys office near the top of Rockefeller Center to hold a quiet memorial for Mr. Wasserstein, said two people in attendance. As several more partners listened in on a conference call, Mr. Golub read from the press release. One or two others said some words about Mr. Wasserstein. Then the group held a moment of silence before a person in the room said, “Okay, lets get back to work.”

How about that legacy!

Of course, the downsides of financial valuation are there. Top of my list has to be travel, in particular, short-notice travel and the all-too-common middle seat that gets assigned. It’s terrible! Not only is there no way to use a laptop, but inevitably you’re fighting for two armrests and of course you will only win one at a time, so the other arm gets to sit neatly tucked into your body, a perfect recipe for pit sweat you know you’ll have to address before the big meeting. Yeah, not fun.

Anyway, it’s no surprise that people would rather rather have their teeth drilled instead of traveling in a middle seat. I feel ‘em. If anything I’m grateful for Southwest wherever they fly — at least if I can’t get a window or aisle seat, it’s my own fault.

Ah, the banalities of a career where you’re wanted.

Truth be told, there is a little money being made…by the support network. The cloud computing firms that host the Facebook apps, the developers selling the Twitter iPhone apps. Unfortunately, it’s just ancillary income on the scale that Facebook and Twitter need to make to satisfy their cost of capital.