Senate Passes Farm Bill with Broadband Provisions Unchanged
Rural broadband deployment would get a boost under the farm bill approved Thursday in the Senate Agriculture Committee. The omnibus measure kept intact provisions dealing with loans to rural broadband providers, along with new definitions billed as ensuring that help is targeted to truly rural parts of the country. The bill also would set up a national clearinghouse to track how many broadband providers serve a particular area. The underlying bill would extend for five years rules governing federal agriculture spending.
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The bill would change the definition of a rural area to exclude cities of 50,000 people and places next to them. It also would exclude places with more than 200 housing units a square mile. This is a change long sought by rural advocates, who have complained that current law enables service providers to qualify for grants to offer service in suburban areas that already multiple providers, rather than limiting them to localities that need their first facilities.
USTelecom said the bill would bring “innovative, high- speed services to consumers living in rural areas,” in a statement by President Walter McCormick. The changes in definitions would properly target loans to rural communities and increase the number of service providers who could qualify for help, he said. McCormick also praised the bill for including language that could expand to the whole country a successful Kentucky program of public-private partnerships to collect broadband service data.
The bill would allow grant funds to be used for 911 services in rural areas. Grant recipients would have to build out broadband services within three years of receiving grants, the legislation says. Loans couldn’t be made for service where three or more terrestrial providers offer comparable services, the bill said. Companies that plan to serve more than 20 percent of a designated area might be required to participate in a market survey, the bill said. No company could command 20 percent or more of grant funds during a fiscal year, it said, with the amount to be set by the Agriculture Department. The government is prohibited from making public proprietary information that applicants must submit to get loans. The bill seeks $25 million over five years for the broadband loan program. A separate $10 million is requested for the “Connect Nation” portion of the bill, which would put NTIA and the FCC in charge of creating a nationwide database of broadband service providers to identify areas lacking service or underserved.
The bill seeks $5 million over the five years to support a newly created national center for rural telecommunications assessment. The bill also extends a current provision that would provide grants to rural public TV stations for farm- related programming.