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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Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
By Christina Kirchner, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, September 1, 2009 – State and local governments said during a Federal Communications Commission workshop on Tuesday that extending broadband is important for economic development purposes.
Among the programs discussed at the workshop were those with the past goal of expanding broadband services into areas which were once inaccessible to any form of internet service, and providing education for these services.
“Areas of the country that don’t have access to broadband services of at least 10 Megabits [per second (Mbps)] in the next five years will be as economically disadvantaged as those areas in the first half of the 20th century that did not have paved roads or electricity,” said Ray Baum, commissioner of the Oregon Public Utilities Commission and head of the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners committee on telecommunications.
He said that 10 Mbps was the minimum necessary as the base of broadband for services, including health care and education.
However, before the expansion of accessible broadband reaches rural areas, digital literacy, or education in the use of computers and broadband services is a necessity, said Jane Smith Patterson, executive director of e-NC Authority in North Carolina.
“There was a development at the local level [called] public...
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Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Press Release
Executive Director Drew Clark to Provide Legislative Update on Broadband Data Improvement Act
WASHINGTON, November 3 - Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director of BroadbandCensus.com, will speak in Silicon Valley on Thursday, November 6, at the
summit on broadband data sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
Clark, the journalist who launched BroadbandCensus.com in January 2008 as a means of providing the public with an objective measure of where broadband is available and which carriers offer it, was invited to speak at the "Broadband Summit: Connecting America." The joint FCC-NARUC summit is co-located with the Wireless Communications Association Symposium and Business Expo in San Jose, Calif.
Clark will provide a "Legislative Update: Broadband Mapping Bill," from 12:40 p.m. to 1:10 p.m. He will speak in particular about the Broadband Data Improvement Act, S. 1492, which passed Congress and was signed into law by President Bush on Friday, October 10. He will also address other versions of broadband data legislation.
Clark's remarks at the conference will be preceeded by FCC Chairman
Kevin Martin, FCC Commissioner
Deborah Taylor Tate, Indiana Utility Regulatory Commissioner
Larry Landis, California Public Utility Commissioner...
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
News
By Drew Bennett, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, October 7 – Congress last week passed legislation, the “Broadband Data Improvement Act,” that seeks better information about high-speed internet connections through enhanced data collection by five separate government agencies.
But as passed by the Senate and the House, S. 1492 deleted all authorization of funds – an amount that had totaled $40 million for each of fiscal years 2008 through 2012 in the Senate Commerce Committee version of the legislation.
Although S. 1492 was agreed to by the House, the bill undercut many of the key features of a companion House bill, the “Broadband Census of America Act,” H.R. 3919.
H.R. 3919 passed the House in November 2007. It would have forced the disclosure of company-by-company broadband data. It also would have created a national broadband map under the aegis of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, with details on broadband coverage by every broadband provider at the nine-digit ZIP code level. Both features are absent in the final bill.
The Senate finally passed S. 1492 on Friday, September 26 – the same day that many state officials and academics gathered in Washington at the “Broadband Census for America Conference” sponsored by BroadbandCensus.com, Carnegie Mellon...
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