I want to thank Brent Christensen of the Minnesota Telecom Alliance for talking with me today about local access charges and Universal Service Funds and how they have helped to finance broadband in rural areas. As their web site states…
The Minnesota Telecom Alliance is a trade association that advocates and represents the interests of nearly 100 small, medium and large companies that provide advanced telecommunications services like voice, data, wireless video, and high-speed Internet access to Minnesota’s metropolitan and rural communities.
Their members are on the frontlines of providing access to some very rural parts of the state. They are benefactors of the local access charges and so I thought it would be helpful to learn more about the role that the funding plays in deploying and maintaining rural access. Brent goes over that and more, offering some suggestions to help policy catch up with technology and an explanation about the differences between intra-state and interstate charges.
I wanted to also note that Brent was on the original Minnesota Ultra-High Speed Broadband Task Force and remain in the current Task Force.
