Universal Service Fund

Rep Bill Johnson (R-OH), Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, and local dignitaries met to discuss the importance of broadband access for Southeastern Ohio’s rural communities. In Marietta (OH), Chairman Pai outlined the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) at the roundtable. He said the RDOF would be divided into two phases. Phase 1 will cost $16 billion and will target areas with no broadband access. He said part of phase 2 will be data collection. “We’ll collect information from providers as a map may show an area has service, but they don’t in reality,” he explained.

Here are just a few pieces that we think are worthy of further consideration and some modification before the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) order becomes final.

The major broadband associations have gotten to together to urge the Federal Communications Commission to make changes to the proposed Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

The problem with using speed alone in assessing the capabilities of broadband networks is that it represents only one product characteristic, and is not necessarily linked with the requirements of the applications commonly used by end consumers.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) sounded the alarm on a misguided plan from the Federal Communications Commission that would exacerbate the digital divide in numerous Upstate New York communities and called on it to reverse course at once. The FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund will allocate $20.4 billion to connect millions of rural homes and small businesses to high-speed, broadband internet.

Frontier provided the Federal Communications Commission notice that, based on its current year-end data, it met or exceeded the FCC Connect America Fund Phase II program’s December 31, 2019 interim broadband deployment milestone in 16 states, but, based on preliminary year-end data, it may not have reached the CAF Phase II 80 percent interim deployment milestone in 13 states. More information by March 1, 2020.

CenturyLink provided the Federal Communications Commission notice that its current year-end data shows it met or exceeded the Connect America Fund Phase II program’s interim broadband deployment milestone in ten states, but, based on preliminary year-end data, it may not have met the CAF Phase II 80 percent interim deployment milestone in 23 states. Additional information coming by March 1, 2020.

In a letter, the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition applauded Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai for promoting fiber broadband deployment to schools and libraries through the E-rate program. “Competitive bidding has been a fundamental principle of the E-rate program since its inception,” said John Windhausen, executive director of the SHLB Coalition.

The federal government is about to spend more than $120 million on subsidies that, rather than improving rural connectivity, will make tens of thousands of families worse off. These funds are part of a 2018 federal program intended to expand rural broadband access called the Connect America Fund phase II (CAF II) reverse auction. The program, in which Internet access providers competed for subsidies, will distribute nearly $1.5 billion over the next 10 years to connect unserved rural residents.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau has pending before it eight petitions for reconsideration of various aspects of the intercarrier compensation provisions of the Universal Service Fund/ USF/Intercarrier Compensation Transformation Order. Each of the Petitions was filed in 2011 and no entities have filed comments or ex parte submissions regarding these petitions for several years.