Loan Guarantees: A Fourth Option for Spurring Broadband Deployment

How can you spur high-speed Internet access: tax incentives, direct government loans, and grants -- and loan guarantees. How do the latter work? If you have a market-ready, rural, full-fiber project within 60 days you can get a partial loan guarantee of 80% of the losses up to 60% of the total loan that must be used within 120 days of approval. What these guarantees do is dramatically reduce the risk of a full-fiber project, which is essential to loosening up private capital to invest in these networks as they're still perceived as being very risky projects, especially in rural areas. By lowering the risk we're more projects become viable while also lowering the interest rates projects that are already viable have to pay. But there are also a number of other notable benefits.