The Universal Service Fund money comes from telecommunications providers based an assessment of their interstate and international revenues. It goes to subsidize telecommunications service (phones) to low income programs and high-cost areas and services (broadband) schools and libraries and towards rural health care.
USF came up yesterday at the MHTA meeting on the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force. John Stanoch of Qwest brought it up and mentioned that if restructured the USF could help support broadband access to un/underserved areas.
There’s good news. According to MulitChannel News, “House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-Va.) is circulating a draft of a bill that would extend the Universal Service Fund to broadband and set a minimum speed of service to qualify for the subsidy.” (Thanks to Ann Higgins for sending the article.)
The plan is to relook at the Fund, which has not grown with the times and kept up with both growing demand for broadband and diversity of telecommunications/communications carriers. Here’s more info taken from the article:
The bill, The Universal Service Reform Act, would require fund recipients to offer broadband at a download rate of 1.5 mbps within five years. That’s twice the FCC’s current definition of high speed, but less than many parties argue will be necessary for some of the bandwidth-hunger apps either in the market or on the drawing board.
Contributions would be based on revenues, phone numbers, or a combination of the two, with that call left up to the FCC. If it chooses revenues, those can be based on intrastate, interstate and “foreign” services.The fund will create a competitive bidding process for wireless carriers and cap the total growth, with a couple of exceptions. One will be the closing of the so-called “parent trap.” The fund has heretofore capped the payments to a carrier who buys phone exchanges to the amount the previous owner was getting. That rule would be eliminated in the hopes of spurring sales to rural carriers.
I suspect that details such as download rate requirements might be best left elusive (or maybe penciled in) until the National Broadband Plan is set – but I like to see that these things are being considered. Because USF is an existing funding structure, I think it’s easier for many to look at restructuring it than starting from scratch with something completely different.
