Strickling Defends NTIA Handling of BTOP Grants
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling declared victory Wednesday in the agency’s effort to manage the huge number of applications for grants that came in to the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program and get the final awards out ahead of Thursday’s deadline. Strickling told us he regretted there wasn’t more money available for public safety networks but said the projects approved should help the government gather data for a national network. He said his agency will soon recommend the spectrum band to pair with the AWS-3 band for wireless broadband. Strickling was the keynoter at the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors annual meeting.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
"Skeptics of the program last winter saw how long it was taking us to get the first $1 billion out in round one, and there were people making predictions that there was no way NTIA was going to get all this money out in the timeframe,” Strickling said of BTOP. “The fact of the matter is we put three times as much money out in about a third of the time in round two.” He gave much of the credit to grant seekers, who he said developed better proposals for the second round.
The number of applications was beyond what NTIA expected, Strickling said. “We didn’t know what we were going to see,” he said. “At the end of the day, we didn’t have time to write out a list of specifications for people and say, ‘Okay, this is exactly the kind of project we're going to fund. If you don’t fit this definition don’t bring us an application.'"
In the first of the two BTOP funding rounds, applicants sought 10 times the total money available, Strickling said. “It became very clear that the problem of providing broadband to our country was a much bigger issue than I think anyone had really understood,” he said. Most reports show that most Americans have access to broadband, Strickling said. “That didn’t begin to tell the story in terms of the adequacies of our broadband network,” he said.
It became clear “very quickly” that service to schools, libraries and hospitals is subpar. “We have masked the inadequacies of broadband networks for these anchor institutions by only focusing on the mass market,” he said. A highlight of the BTOP program is that it will pay for broadband connections for 24,000 “anchor institutions,” he noted. BTOP will also pay for many middle-mile projects, he said, saying projects approved “blanket” Missouri and other states with middle-mile infrastructure. “That has got to have an immense effect on the economies of those states as those projects come online,” he said.
Meeting government requirements that come with the money will prove difficult for many companies as projects are built out over the next few years, Strickling predicted. “It has been a real eye-opener for them, as they try to navigate their way through the federal grant process,” he said.
After his speech, Strickling conceded that while public safety networks got special attention, there wasn’t money enough for all of the proposals (CD Sept 29 p2). “No one thought $4 billion was going to solve the problem,” he said. “There are a lot of very good projects that we weren’t able to fund because we didn’t have all of the dollars that we could have spent on good projects. Sure, if we had additional dollars appropriated for additional grants we could put it to good use. No question."
NTIA selected projects that will demonstrate how the 700 MHz networks will work, he said. “We were trying to pick projects that would allow us to learn as much as we can because eventually we want to see these projects built across the country,” he said. “That’s already a commitment of the administration.”
A $154.6 million grant to fund a public safety network in Los Angeles County will offer lessons from a large county, where many public safety agencies have to work together, Strickling said. “We think it’s a really good test of how you do this in a large metro area,” he said. Adams County, Colo., which got $12.1 million for a first-responder network, has the advantage of being adjacent to the NTIA Lab in Boulder, he said. “We already have a test network up,” he said. “It gives us a chance to work on interoperable issues in conjunction with our lab."
Asked about NTIA’s examination of spectrum to be paired with the AWS-3 band, a focus of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, Strickling said, “We'll have more information on that in the next few days as we're completing our work for the president under the Executive Memorandum” on spectrum.