Universal Service Fund

Opponents to Verizon’s planned acquisition of prepaid TracFone often cite the negative impacts they believe it will have on Lifeline subscribers and the prepaid market overall. But Verizon is pitching the transaction as a means of improving TracFone’s ability to provide Lifeline-supported services and better serve the prepaid sector. Verizon said that TracFone, as part of Verizon, will become a stronger competitor against the flanker prepaid brands of AT&T (Cricket ) and T-Mobile (Metro).

Before spending an additional $100 billion of public money on rural broadband, avoiding the mistakes of the past decade would be a good place to start.

Lesson #1: The digital divide was not a consequence of rural economics; it has been the policy of the federal government. Broadband is not simply a speed at a point in time. Rather than focus on a short-term goal of attaining any particular speed, public funding is better spent on long-term infrastructure, best defined as assets with a life of at least thirty years.

The Biden administration’s broadband plan tracks many of the ideas contained in the $94 billion “Internet for all” infrastructure bill that congressional Democrats introduced. And that is not a good thing.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association, NRTC, the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association and the Ensuring RDOF Integrity Coalition (ERIC) have asked the Federal Communications Commission to release a list of census block groups that provisionally won funding through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) program but on which the winning bidder has defaulted.

Do you know how much money your state is getting from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)? We crunched the data to find out how much RDOF money each state will get to expand internet access to rural Americans, breaking it down to dollars per resident.

Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel offered measured confidence about expanding broadband connectivity in schools following the pandemic. Addressing a virtual roundtable meeting of local officials from around Maryland, Chairwoman Rosenworcel promoted a trio of programs funded by Congress and the FCC aimed at improving connectivity for disadvantaged schools and communities.

The Universal Service Fund (USF) is currently on an unsustainable financial path, funded by a regressive surcharge on a shrinking base of telephone customers. If it isn’t fixed, and fixed quickly, the fund won’t be able to meet its mandate and fulfill its connectivity promise – not just to the next generation, but to the current one. So how do we fix USF? 

What constitutes a lifeline in 2021? Is it a phone? A smartphone? A fixed-location broadband connection? Or some combination of all these services?

There is no shortage of options for immediate and long-term funding for K-12 home connectivity solutions.

FOR LONG TERM K-12 FUNDING:

Despite years of effort and tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, the United States still faces a stubborn rural-urban broadband gap. A large, one-time injection of federal capital can succeed in bridging the rural broadband divide if it is reasonably targeted and allocated through a reverse-auction program that serves as a transition away from the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. The current FCC program is funded through regressive fees levied on a shrinking base of telecommunications services.