FCC Grants Petitions for Waiver of Rural Broadband Experiment Obligations

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau issued an order granting two petitions seeking waiver of obligations to provide service to a specific number of locations as part of the rural broadband experiments program, filed by Allamakee-Clayton Electric Cooperative and Consolidated Communications Networks. The bureau said petitioners demonstrated the required number of locations exceeds the actual number the petitioners have been able to identify within their respective study areas. The bureau also said in granting these waiver requests, it made pro-rata adjustments to the petitioners’ support amounts and directed the Universal Service Administrative Company to prorate reductions in future payments for the remainder of the support term.

[On July 14, 2014, the FCC established the RBE program as part of its universal service high-cost program. The FCC designed this program to test future Connect America Fund (CAF) auction processes that would allocate support in price cap territories where the average cost of service exceeded a certain high-cost threshold, as determined by the Connect America Model (CAM). For this program, the FCC set bidding areas based on census block and limited available funding only to residential and small business locations in eligible high-cost census blocks. The FCC required successful bidders to serve every CAM-determined location within their winning bid areas (including locations for which no support had been allocated). In addition, RBE support recipients were required to submit information about their served locations on an annual basis and to certify, by certain deadlines, incremental progress in meeting their defined deployment obligations, measured as a percentage of their full obligation (build-out milestones).]