ManyMedia

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the Department of Agriculture released their initial 121 page “Notice of Funds Availability” (NOFA), the “stimulus program” for “broadband” projects. (I note with some consternation that the NOFA is specifying a tool (broadband) rather than the end goal of providing access to the Internet.) One of the major challenges in this NOFA is that it is designed to promote projects in unserved areas. The reason this is a challenge is that obtaining numbers for communities that are served, under-served, or unserved are difficult to come by, and even harder to prove.

Geoff Daily of AppRising has an intriguing idea. In his article Why Not Force Incumbents To Show Which Areas Are Served? Daily points out that the definitions underlying rural Internet access subsidies are rather problematic because they effectively limit funds to only the most rural areas (by excluding marginalized urban areas), and allow the incumbent telephone interests to refute claims of service by the upstarts. To address this problem:

I’d like to propose an alternative solution: why not force incumbents to show which areas are already served by threatening to consider all areas unserved that they don’t produce verifiable data for showing that they offer service there?

By doing this we’ll save applicants from wasting a lot of time and money collecting data that already exists, plus we’ll also enable them to know if the area they’re putting together a project for qualifies for subsidies before submitting their application. Additionally we’ll be able to take this data and use it to inform the broadband maps we’re charged with creating.

On the carrier side, we give them a clear reason for why they should give up their data on the availability of their services so as to insure we’re not subsidizing duplicative investment. And at the same time we can remove any appearance of prioritizing the protection of private service provider interests over making real progress in the deployment of broadband.

Hey, the incumbents have the real numbers. Why not make good use of them?

Network, Policy, Uncategorized access, incumbents, Internet, SOHO Nets, stimulus, underserved, unserved

Perhaps it should be no surprise that when it comes to real access to the Internet, the government is swayed by promises of “broadband” and claims of existing “competition.” Federal stimulus funds are hard enough for some service providers to come by. Now we learn that municipalities wishing to provide Internet access to their citizens are targeted for exclusion. Telephony Online’s article Broadband stimulus details separating likely winners, losers, states:

One group of broadband stimulus hopefuls that has been in large part swept out of the running by the specifics of the plan is individual municipalities of any size. Though the stimulus plan stoked broad interest from municipalities earlier this year, many of them have been frustrated by the program’s preference for “underserved areas,” which the government has defined as areas where where at least half of all households lack broadband, where fewer than 40% of households subscribe to broadband, or where no service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least 3 Mb/s.

Those rules sent the city of Northfield, Minnesota, for example, which had hoped to secure stimulus funds, back to the drawing board in its efforts to finance its plans. Melissa Reeder, Northfield’s information technology director, told the local press, “Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single Minnesota city that would qualify.”

This policy decision is short-sighted and will not deliver on the promises of Federal stimulus funds. Now you can expect to pay twice (once in the form of taxes to pay for the stimulus funds and once for your ISP bills) for more of the same.

Network, Policy access, broadband, Internet, muni nets, municiple networks, Policy, stimulus, stimulus funds