"As I look at it, the noise about a broadband gap is hooey," Hansell wrote. "With new cable modem technology becoming available, 19 out of 20 American homes eventually will be able to have Internet service that is faster than any available now anywhere in the world."

Hansell suggested the stimulus package should focus on unserved areas instead of spending tens of billions [b] of dollars to increase speeds in areas already served by broadband providers, as some groups have called for. "It is hardly clear that the country would get an adequate return from subsidizing what is essentially duplicate capacity," he wrote.

Berin Szoka, a fellow at conservative think tank the Progress and Freedom Foundation, also questioned how the government will be able to gauge the effectiveness of any stimulus money for broadband. He suggested the broadband stimulus is "corporate welfare" in a Jan. 20 .

"How would one actually evaluate the efficacy of any proposed government intervention?" Szoka wrote. "As difficult as it is to predict the unintended consequences of intervention, it's even more difficult to do so in high-tech sectors of the economy, where the rate of change is particularly rapid."

But stimulus money will be needed to reach that last 5 percent to 10 percent of U.S. residents who don't have access to broadband, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF's president. Many of those people are in rural areas where broadband providers have been reluctant to provide service because of the cost per customer, he said.