These aspirational projects are how government earns a bad rap for being wasteful. If Comcast and Verizon formed a cartel and said it would drop regular service and force everyone to upgrade for an extra $20/mo for five years or $10/mo for ten years people would shout and scream. But when the government makes the exact same promise it gets cheerleaders.

At this point the cheerleaders usually make some promise about increased efficiencies or spurred economic growth that will make their plan "pay for itself." These are only promises because the results will never be measured and any failures will be blamed on not doing enough or justified by further fluffy statistics. You can buy many gadgets and fuel additives to put on your car to save fuel; if you believe each of their claims and install all of them then you would expect your car to actually produce more gasoline than it consumes. So too the sum total benefits of claimed government efficiencies and benefits exceeds 100% of the actual total of real world growth.

In the case of broadband would you believe Verizon or Comcast if they told you they were actually forcing you to earn more money by upgrading your service and charging you more money? I didn't think so.