The Regulatory Mix, TMI’s daily blog of regulatory activities, is a snapshot of PUC, FCC, legislative, and occasionally court, issues that our regulatory monitoring team uncovers each day. Depending on their significance, some items may be the subject of a TMI Regulatory Bulletin.
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FCC
Rural Broadband Experiments
The FCC announced the bidders that have been provisionally selected for rural broadband experiment funding in each category, subject to the post-selection review process. The bidders are seeking support to serve diverse geographic areas with different cost characteristics. Collectively, they bid on support to cover 26,867 census blocks in 25 states and Puerto Rico. According to the FCC:
- 19 entities are seeking support to build networks that are capable of delivering 100 Mbps downstream and 25 Mbps upstream to all locations in the project census blocks in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Puerto Rico.
- 12 entities are seeking support to build networks capable of delivering 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream to all locations in the project census blocks in Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
- 9 entities are seeking support to build networks capable of delivering 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream to all locations in project census blocks that are extremely costly to serve in California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, North Dakota, Kansas, South Dakota, and Texas.
The selected entities must complete FCC Form 5620 and upload their post-selection review attachments by December 19, 2014. Failure to submit the requested materials by this deadline will constitute a default, and the bidder will no longer be considered for the identified rural broadband experiment.
Universal Service Monitoring Report
The federal and state staff members of the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service released their Universal Service Monitoring Report based on information available as of September 2014. The report contains information designed to monitor the impact of various universal service support mechanisms and the method used to finance them. The report incorporates data from several sources, including the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA) and Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC). The Report has seven sections: Section 1 provides an update on industry revenues, universal service program funding requirements, and contribution factors. Sections 2 through 5 provide the latest data on the low-income, high-cost, schools and libraries, and rural health care support mechanisms. Section 6 presents recent Census data on voice telephony subscribership from the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey as well as data on telephone penetration by income by state and residential Internet subscribership. Section 7 includes updated Consumer Price Index data. An Appendix provides additional information regarding the high-cost program, updating the Universal Service Implementation Report released in March 2014.
