Stevens: Rural Subsidies Key to New Law

[SOURCE: Multichannel News 3/7, AUTHOR: Ted Hearn]
Providing subsidies for rural telecommunications services -- possibly even broadband access for the first time -- is crucial to passing a new telecommunications law, Senate Commerce Committee chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said Tuesday at a hearing designed to highlight the importance of high-speed Internet access to thinly populated regions of the country. “I think this is a key issue for this telecom bill. If we can get an agreement on universal service, we can get a bill,” Sen Stevens said. “But there is still a lot of opposition to universal service per se in the Congress.” Sen Stevens said he hoped his committee would pass a bill in early April and the full Senate would debate the measure soon after Congress returned from its Easter recess the last week of that month. Sen Stevens and many other rural lawmakers are concerned that the $7 billion subsidy program called universal service is inadequately funded. Some lawmakers not only want to plug the funding gap, but also to expand the program’s mission to include funding rural broadband access. At the hearing, another cable concern arose: whether the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service is providing loans and grants to broadband providers operating in competitive markets. Claiming that the RUS is funding their competitors, cable companies have said that the federal money was intended to help deliver high-speed access to communities that never had it. “We have got to find a way to ensure that this program works as intended,” Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6313943.html?display=Breaking+News
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