Stakeholders Debate Rural Broadband Deployment Challenges at FCC Workshop

A Federal Communications Commission workshop was organized with the goal of offering insight on how the FCC should allocate funding for rural broadband trials and ultimately, how a broadband Connect America Fund for rate of return carriers would be structured.

The workshop drew on a wide range of stakeholders and offered a lot of food for thought, but also illustrated that considerable more work will need to be done before the FCC can answer those questions. The total number of entities that have expressed interest in participating in the rural broadband trials has now reached 997, FCC officials said.

A workshop panel on rural broadband build-out strategies included representatives from several types of entities that have expressed interest in participating in the rural broadband trials, including:

• a municipality (Greenlight Community Broadband of Wilson (NC))
• a rural incumbent telco (Golden West Telecommunications)
• a utility co-operative (Co-Mo Comm)
• a wireless Internet service provider (Highspeedlink.net)
• a satellite broadband service provider (Hughes Network Systems)
• a rural cable company (Troy Cablevision)
• a large price cap carrier (AT&T)
• a cellular carrier that has moved into fiber-to-the-home (C Spire)