CenturyLink Accepts More Than Half of This Year’s Connect America Funding

CenturyLink said it would accept $54 million of $90 million offered to the company through the Connect America Fund (CAF) program to help cover some of the cost of bringing broadband to areas that cannot get broadband today.

Under the terms of the program established for this year, the company also will invest an additional $54 million or more of its own in the broadband deployments, which will include 33 of the 37 states where the company is the incumbent local telephone service provider. The commission last year established a yearly funding amount for each of the nation’s largest price cap carriers, based on the number of rural lines in a carrier’s territory. Last year CenturyLink accepted $35 million of the $90 million it was offered. The company likely accepted a higher amount of funding this year because the terms of the program changed somewhat for this year. In addition to offering the carrier $775 per line to bring service to customers that could not get broadband speeds of 768 kbps downstream and 200 kbps upstream, this year’s program also gives carriers the option of accepting $550 per line for homes that cannot get service at speeds of 3 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream. And it appears that CenturyLink is primarily targeting homes in that category. According to the release, the company expects to bring service to nearly 95,000 homes for this year, which works out to an average of $568 per home.