Will broadband stimulus round 2 lure bigger telcos?

Now that the rules have changed for the second round of broadband stimulus funding awards, will incumbent telco carriers get more involved?

None of the three former Bell carriers applied for the first round of funding. And of the biggest rural telcos - CenturyLink, Windstream and Frontier Communications, which might have the broadest reach into unserved areas - only Frontier applied for stimulus in the first round, and only in one state (West Virginia).

Carl Russo, chief executive officer of Calix — a broadband equipment vendor that counts at least one first-round stimulus winner among its rural telco customer base - predicted last summer that carriers that had sat out the first round would join in the second. Upsetting that prediction to some degree was the fact that there wasn't much opportunity to apply lessons from the first round to second-round rules changes. Not many first-round winners have been named yet (the batch announced last month represents only about 9% of first-round funds, though, in total, applicants asked for more than four times the amount available). And second-round applications are already due March 15.