NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association

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.

NTCA believes the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to impose an additional cap atop all of the collective universal service programs is unnecessary and contrary to the statutory design of the programs. When Congress called for creation of these programs in 1996, it directed that each of these mechanisms should have sufficient funding.

A wireless network will only be as good as the wired infrastructure beneath it. More users and devices on a wireless network eventually necessitate more wired infrastructure upgrades to accommodate increased traffic and consumer demands, and many consumers’ bandwidth consumption is growing at a pace where only fiber will ultimately be able to satisfy demands.