Financial advisers, business counselors and bankers all urge meticulous research and abundant caution, but all investments are – in the end – leaps of faith. If I decide my neighborhood needs a new sandwich shop, my first stop should be my local library. There I can pore over publicly available data on the number of households within various traveling distances from possible locations.

And, combining those data with reports from the Department of Labor on business locations and wages paid in the area, I can estimate how much income is available to be spent in my neighborhood. Then, I can look at publicly available data on consumer spending. How much do people – by income level and household size – spend on food, particularly food consumed outside the home. Multiplying this by my household income and business earnings data, I can estimate how much total money is available to support all the restaurants in the neighborhood.

Then – armed with this overview of “my market” – I can walk around and see how many eateries already exist in this area, list what they serve and note what prices they charge. I can sample their wares and make a judgment about what’s missing. If I’m really careful, I can hire my own market survey expert to do more specific consumer research.

How do people in my neighborhood like their current choices? What do they think is missing? What would they be willing to pay for a new alternative? I could draw a larger circle extending beyond my neighborhood and estimate how many people “from away” I might attract into my neighborhood.

But in the end, regardless of what all the data I have gathered “say,” I have to make my own leap of faith, I have to decide if the potential payoff is worth the commitment of my money (and probably some borrowed money) and my time. Do I make the leap or don’t I?

I reference this simple investment dilemma – one that is played out thousands of times every year – because of the question being posed to citizens in municipalities across the nation and, increasingly, here in Maine. Should we invest in a publicly owned broadband network?

Citizens in Rockport, South Portland, Sanford, Portland and probably other places have answered or soon will have to answer this fundamental investment question. “Will the payoff from creating a piece of digital infrastructure, be it an entirely new network or simply a new set of connections to an existing network, exceed the money we would have to pay to build and operate it?”

I have no answer to this question. As with all investments, some are likely to be dazzling successes while others become dismal failures. What I do know, however, is that few investments face more difficulty in obtaining the information necessary to distinguish between these two alternatives. On the one side, there are the sky-high promises.

High-speed broadband has the ability to overcome the barriers of time and place – live in Maine, work anywhere; receive world-class health care and education right at home. The Internet of things will replace all routine work – set our thermostats, drive our cars, make our vacation reservations, pay our taxes. The possibilities are endless. Build it and they will come!

On the other side is the enormous and widespread confusion about both the nature of the infrastructure and the things that it does or, more importantly, would allow us to do.

High-, medium- and low-speed asphalt highways are intuitively obvious. We all know how to navigate them, and we use this knowledge every day to inform major investment decisions like where we live and work. High-, medium- and low-speed broadband highways, in contrast, are mysterious, understood only by electrical engineers and tech gurus.

Only the most informed of us can find the maps locating these highways and use them to guide our career, home and job location decisions. Only recently have studies demonstrated that otherwise similar houses in areas served by high-speed broadband command higher prices than those in areas with lower levels of service.

The Census began gathering data on Internet availability and use only several years ago. Data on who uses Internet services to accomplish what tasks – data crucial for estimating what businesses and households in what locations are likely to use Internet services at what speeds – are nowhere near as available to the general public as more traditional household, labor market and industrial data.

And that is fine. That’s how our economy works. My sandwich shop will survive or fail based on how many people are willing to pay the prices I charge for the sandwiches I offer. Similarly, municipal broadband networks will survive or fail based on the number of users willing to pay the prices charged for the services provided.

The biggest difference is that getting the information to make an informed decision on the second leap of faith is much more difficult than for the first.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be reached at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com

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