Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, November 18, 2009 - The Universal Service Fund is in need of an overhaul to equalize costs among stakeholders and modernize programs to include broadband services, a group of industry representatives and regulators told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet during a Tuesday hearing.
The hearing examined a discussion draft of the Universal Service Reform Act of 2009, authored by subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb.
The Universal Service program, which existed for decades before being codified in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, is under "tremendous pressure" and requires a comprehensive effort to reform its operations, Boucher said during opening remarks.
Reform is needed because new technologies for long distance voice communications have reduced the available revenue that can be tapped to fund current programs, leading to soaring costs for consumers – a projected 14 percent of revenues in January of 2010, he said.
Such an increase and a maintenance of the status quo is simply "not sustainable," Boucher said. The Boucher-Terry bill would cap the high cost portion of the fund while requiring wireless carriers who participate to do so through a competitive bidding process. Such legislative...
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Saturday, November 14th, 2009
By Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, November 14, 2009 - Congresswoman Doris Matsui
touted legislation in a speech Friday that would require the Federal Communications Commission to create a program that would enable qualifying low-income customers to purchase broadband service at reduced prices.
Under the bill filed last month,
H.R.3646, the government would reimburse broadband providers for each low-income customer served and ensure that the program would be neutral to different technologies.
“We need to extend the privilege of home internet access to all American families,” Matsui, a Democrat, told a crowd of students, faculty and community members at the Sacramento State Alumni Center in California. “For far too long, lower-income families have been disadvantaged in large part by the lack of access to affordable broadband services. To fully close the digital divide, it is critical that we address the affordability of these services,” she said.
Matsui said she has been “a strong advocate for broadband grants to be allocated to schools and libraries, and to ‘underserved’ communities so that more Americans have access to the internet.” According to statistics referenced by the lawmaker, only 58 percent of Californians earning under $40,000 a year subscribed to dial-up or broadband at...
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Friday, November 13th, 2009
By Mercy Gakii, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, November 13, 2009 - Access charges are well above the actual costs to connect telephone calls, despite the efforts made by the Federal Communications Commission, said Andy Regitsky of Regitsky and Associates, in a webinar presentation on “Access Charges and Network costs - A Guide to FCC Reform,”
hosted by CCMI.
“The FCC is not ready to give control over access charges which have been flawed for the 25 years of their existence,” said Regitsky.
Regitsky said that access reform is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed, with the national broadband plan due to be presented to Congress in February 2010. The plan will likely require universal service changes. Most internet telephone companies – including Google Voice – have become enmeshed in controversy for refusing to pay access charges for terminating some voice calls.
Currently, he said, the FCC must work with different state public utility commissions on the thorny question of equalizing telephone calls that cross state lines and those that stay within the boundaries of a particular territory. Interstate calls are under the jurisdiction of the FCC, and access charges for those calls tend to be lower than calls within a state.
“If...
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Saturday, October 31st, 2009
By Rahul Gaitonde, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
October 31, 2009 - Finland made headlines earlier this month in declaring that broadband had become a legal right. While this startled some people, the Finns were not the first people to declare this – the Swiss were. Further, in 2003, at the World Summit on the Information Society, a declaration of principles was drafted and signed by a number of nations around the world, including the United States.
While Finland is the first nation to declare broadband a right, many nations around the world have developed plans to have universal service within the next 5 years. Finland’s plan is to have 100 percent coverage by 2015 at 100 Megabits per second, but the parliament has yet to officially approve the recommendation.
The United Kingdom announced through their Digital Britain plan to have 100 percent coverage by 2012 with a minimum speed of 2 Mbps. Germany has also announced full coverage by the end of 2010: 75 percent of all households are to have speeds of 50 Mbps by 2014, and then 100 Mbps for 100 percent of households by 2018. France also announced a plan to get universal coverage by 2012.
All of those plans were established...
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Monday, October 5th, 2009
By the Staff of BroadbandCensus.com
The universal service fund has been growing at an alarming rate over the past few years, and in order to curb its growth the Federal Communications Commission choose to cap the amount of support a competitive eligible telecommunications company could receive in 2008. The Rural Cellular Association filed a petition in the D.C. Circuit court of appeals to remove this cap. The court seemed to support the position of the FCC in capping the fund, according to a Monday research report by
Stifel Nicholas.
Even though the cap is in place, the FCC has allowed eligible recipients of Universal Service Funds to petition to receive an increase in current support if they need more funds. The rural cellular group believes that the petition mechanism that the FCC has setup is not fair, as there is no benchmarking to compare against.
There has been a large amount of criticism about the funding of competitive telecom companies, due to the fact that the amount a company receives is based upon the funding request a company asks for not an objective amount based upon customers services or presumed costs. The current USF system is clearly broken, said Stifel, and...
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Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
By Douglas Streeks, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 21, 2009 – A panel of broadband experts agreed Monday that the Universal Service Fund should direct more of its funding to low-income areas and away from exclusively focusing on rural high-cost areas, where funds are not being spent efficiently.
The experts spoke during a panel discussion sponsored by the Technology Policy Institute, a market-oriented think tank on technology issues.
The term universal service, said Jonathan Nuechterlein, a partner at Wilmer Hale law firm, has two different meanings.
One meaning has to do with funding for broadband in high-cost areas where deployment is expensive, regardless of the residents’ income, and the other has to do with funding for low-income areas.
“Funding broadband,” said Nuechterlein, “is expensive” and is going to “increase the burden on the companies that end up subsidizing it.” One way to ensure that this money is spent efficiently is to “narrow the scope” by only funding broadband in “genuinely unserved areas,” he said.
The whole “cluster of issues” dealing with universal service legislation, said Nuechterlein, “is tied with inter-carrier compensation.”
Traditionally, small rural carriers depended on carrier-to-carrier networks to fund their expenditures, but because there are now ways to avoid public access charges, the whole system is...
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Friday, June 12th, 2009
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 12, 2009 - Americans are increasingly supportive of government programs to guarantee universal internet access while remaining wary of regulation, said a Zogby poll released Friday.
Almost half of the 3,030 respondents to the survey - 44 percent - believe universal internet access should be guaranteed by the federal government. Of respondents, 20 percent said they support programs to give Americans personal computers if they lack them.
And more than two-thirds, or 71 percent, say those who lack internet access will be less successful economically than those who regularly go online.
But universal access remains a partisan issue, the survey said. While 78 percent of liberals said the government should make sure the internet is available to all, only 18 percent of conservatives agreed with the statement.
Computer give-aways were less popular on both sides, with only 40 percent of liberals and 7 percent of conservatives supporting the idea.
Americans of all ideologies remain against internet regulation by the government, the survey also noted. Just 17 percent support sales tax on e-commerce, and 78 percent said such a tax woukd "severely hamper online commerce and violate the spirit of the internet as a free exchange."
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
By Ryan Womack, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 10, 2009 - In comments filed Monday before the Federal Communications Commission on its plan to unveil a national broadband strategy, old foes got a fresh chance to spar in long-standing battles over Special Access rates, Universal Service reform, and deployment versus adoption rates as a metric for success.
For Sprint Nextel Corp., competition is "the key to ensuring and expanding widespread, affordable broadband access.” But true facilities-based competition is being undermined by incumbent local exchange carriers -- the owners of the fiber pipes that hook wireless phones back into the telephone network at the tower, Sprint said. ILEC's "dominate the special access markets" to the detriment of the industry, the company warned -- leading to “lost productivity, lost income, and lost jobs.”
Verizon Communications, often a main target of Sprint Nextel's ire, called for the FCC to encourage “consumer empowerment" by allowing free choice of services, applications and devices on a "robust...secure broadband network." The FCC's plan should be "pro-innovation. pro-growth," Verizon said.
Investment in wireless is the key to a superior strategy, says T-Mobile, the nation's fourth-largest mobile phone carrier. Wireless deployment costs are "frequently less significant than comparable wired broadband deployments," the company wrote,...
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