NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association

I celebrated my thirteenth anniversary back at NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association in this role leading the best association team and the most exciting industry. I spent 20 years at NTCA after working on Capitol Hill and loved everything about the membership that the organization represented. At the time I started (in the dark ages, per my daughters), our mission was about bringing telephone service to rural Americans.

This survey shows that despite ongoing challenges of serving the most sparsely populated parts of the country and notwithstanding pandemic-related supply chain concerns, rural broadband providers have continued to increase broadband speeds available to rural Americans by offering more fiber-to-the-home services than ever before. Survey highlights include: 

As a member of the Rebuild Rural Coalition, which collectively represents US agricultural producers, rural businesses, rural communities, and rural families, NTCA sent a letter urging President Joe Biden and his administration to address the unique needs of rural infrastructure in all related legislative proposals. The groups wrote: Your plan to Build Back Better in Rural America rightly notes the crumbling state of our country’s infrastructure. We have witnessed this deterioration first-hand – how it jeopardizes jobs, our agricultural competitiveness, and the health of rural families.

To gauge the deployment rates of advanced services by its member companies, for nearly two decades NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association (NTCA) has conducted its Broadband/Internet Availability Survey. This latest broadband survey is a follow-up to similar surveys conducted in recent years by NTCA and seeks to build upon the results of those surveys. This year’s survey asked about technologies used to provide broadband service in ILEC service areas, broadband availability and subscription rates, anchor institutions, fixed wireless broadband services, competitive broadband services, mobile vo

This analysis explores, from an economic perspective, the effects of modifying and expanding the “contribution base”—the supply of financial resources for the Universal Service Fund—to include both voice and broadband connections. While the Federal Communications Commission has updated the way universal service funds are distributed to orient them more toward support of both voice and broadband services, the contributions system that pays for the FCC’s mission-critical USF initiatives continues to rely precariously upon a dwindling pool of revenues from legacy services.