Universal Service Fund

Sacred Wind Communications was founded on the premise of “serving the unserved,” given the technological void that envelopes so many tribal communities in New Mexico. While the company continues to expand its broadband deployment initiatives among tribal communities in New Mexico, it still faces an uphill battle when trying to balance high infrastructure buildout costs with high consumer demand, particularly in remote Navajo communities.

New America’s Open Technology Institute filed reply comments with the Federal Communications Commission urging it to reject its proposal to impose restrictions on funding for programs that help low-income consumers, schools and libraries, health care providers, and rural telecommunications providers. OTI submitted the reply comments to illustrate the broad range of initial comments that, similar to OTI's initial comments, oppose the FCC’s plan to implement a spending cap for all four Universal Service Fund (USF) programs.

The Federal Communications Commission authorized over $4.9 billion in support over the next decade for maintaining, improving, and expanding affordable rural broadband for 455,334 homes and businesses served by 171 carriers in 39 states and American Samoa, including 44,243 locations on Tribal lands. The support is targeted to smaller rural carriers, traditionally known as “rate-of-return” carriers.

The Federal Communications Commission authorized support over the next decade for maintaining, improving, and expanding affordable broadband in 44,243 homes and businesses on Tribal lands nationwide. In most of these Tribal homes and businesses – 37,281 of them – carriers must deliver speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps. The authorization on Tribal lands in 13 states was part of a nationwide authorization of over $4.9 billion in support over the next decade for 455,334 homes and businesses served by 171 carriers in 39 states and American Samoa.

Every facet of society depends on broadband connectivity.  2020 presidential candidate Gov Jay Inslee’s (D-WA) is committed to confronting the rural broadband challenge, by:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is looking to root out waste, fraud and abuse in Lifeline, the FCC's phone subsidy program for the poor. But he's not ready to cap the budget on the program just yet. His office began circulating its latest proposal for cleaning up the program. The latest proposed action is what the FCC is calling an "administrative clean-up" but it doesn't tackle some of the more controversial items on the agency's to-do list, such as instituting a funding cap and excluding wireless resellers from participating in the program.

The Aug 12 editorial “Stuck without Internet” outlined possible solutions to address the challenge of connecting more Americans to the Internet. We already have a broadband program to bridge the divide for poor rural Americans. It’s easy to get distracted by talk of spectrum, satellites or running expensive fiber across the entire country.

Four different universal service initiatives, each aimed at solving a different problem, are funded by a single surcharge on interstate and international telecommunications revenue. Over the past two decades, each program has grown independently without much regard to cost, or to the activities of the fund’s other programs. As a result, the surcharge has risen from 3 percent in 1998 to a whopping 24.4 percent today.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg's policies to uplift rural America includes an ambitious and holistic Internet for All initiative to ensure all communities have affordable access to this necessary technology to create businesses, access health care, and expand opportunities for students to learn and thrive.

It's easy to say all Americans should be able to use the Internet in the 21st century, which is probably why several leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have done just that. It’s much harder to say how to get there. Almost everyone, even on both sides of the aisle in Congress, seems able to agree on the need to fix the maps first. That’s because the Federal Communications Commission relies on coverage reports from industry, and carriers have incentive to exaggerate their reach.