Today's Regulatory Mix: USDA Announces Broadband Awards in Alaska, FCC Announces broadband Funding in US Virgin Islands, FCC Authorizes Seventh Year of CAF II Model Support for Price Cap Carriers
The USDA announced it is investing $11.3 million to provide broadband service in unserved and underserved rural areas in Alaska. The funding will allow three companies to deploy fiber networks in Alaska, as follows.
The FCC announced additional funding through its Connect USVI Fund Stage 2 Competitive Process will bring 1 gigabit per second fixed broadband service to all locations in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Specifically, the winning applicant, Broadband VI, is eligible for $84.5 million over 10 years to provide the highest performance tier of 1 Gbps service to 46,039 locations after a competitive process that weighted price, network performance, including speed, latency, and usage allowance, and network resiliency and redundancy
The FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau announced that all eligible price cap carriers that currently receive Connect America Phase II support based on the Connect America Cost Model (CAM) elected to receive an additional, seventh year of such support. Accordingly, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) was directed and authorized to obligate and disburse from the Universal Service Fund the amounts identified on Attachment A to the Notice to the various carriers beginning January 2021. In exchange for receiving this seventh year of support from January 2021 through December 2021, these carriers are required to continue providing broadband with performance characteristics that remain reasonably comparable to the performance characteristics of terrestrial fixed broadband service in urban America.
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The Regulatory Mix, Inteserra’s blog of telecom related 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 an Inteserra Briefing.