The Federal Communications Commission asked for "expressions of interest" from applicants interested in using Connect America Fund subsidies for last mile rural broadband projects, promising to fund between $50 million and $100 million for a small number of them as part of its Internet Protocol (IP) transition program. According to the FCC’s Acting General Counsel Jonathan Sallett, the agency was deluged with nearly 1,000 applications this week.
While these are just "expressions of interest," the high volume of interest shows the pent up demand for broadband that exists in rural areas of the nation who lack broadband or have very slow Internet access (defined as speeds of 3 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream). The next step is for comments to be filed in an FCC further notice of proposed rulemaking on rural broadband experiments, due on March 31, with reply comments due on April 14. After this comment round, the FCC staff will recommend a proposed budget for rural experiments along with selection criteria. The FCC’s five commissioners will then vote on whether to approve the proposal.
More detailed formal applications will be due later this year. It is expected that only a very small number of these rural broadband experiments will be approved in the third or fourth quarter of this year. This experiment is only open to non-incumbent providers of broadband services, including cable operators, competitive telecom providers, wireless Internet Service Providers, municipalities and others.
In late February, the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said he wished to preserve in the Internet Protocol transition what he calls a "network compact" with principles of public safety, universal access, competition, and consumer protection. Through the rural broadband experiments, the FCC wants to collect ideas on how to best deploy rural broadband as the country moves from copper wire technology to IP-based networks.
